Education Commons^™

Girls’ Schooling Empowerment In Rural China: Identifying Capabilities And Social Change In The Village, Vilma Seeberg

Vilma Seeberg

This study is explicitly anchored in an emerging grounded paradigm, the human development capability approach, and proposes its elaboration using empowerment as a perspective, in this case, on the education of excluded village girls. The person-centered development imperative of the empowerment-capability approach provided the conceptual tools that brought together a holistic observation of social location, subjectivities, agency, achievements and transformative change. Seeking to explain village girls' demand for schooling, the work identifies intangible and instrumental capabilities often unrecognized and "their indirect role through influencing social change" (Sen 1999, 296) contributing grounded findings on the concept of empowerment. Findings further show …