Beyond University: Photovoice portraits of some Cambodian young women’s education, identities, and rights

‘Educate a Girl. Change the World.’ Faith in this universalising, simple creed permeates development discourse on education and empowerment. Yet these processes are complex, embedded in specific contexts, and dependent upon many factors outside of formal schooling. This research aims to cut through the vague mists of this discourse by exploring processes of education and empowerment for six young Cambodian women. A small minority of such women graduate from university, and their negotiations with personal, professional, and political life illustrate opportunities and constraints in claiming their education and rights. This research drew from feminist epistemologies and used participatory photovoice methodology. Each participant selected 20 of her photographs which addressed aspects of education and empowerment important to her. Those photographs then guided our semi-structured interviews. This epistemology and methodology allowed women’s images and words to be strongly represented in the thesis and effectively elucidated the complexity and interconnectedness of learning and empowerment processes in the many spheres of these young women’s lives. Through participants’ images and words, this study illustrates factors that supported and challenged the young women in claiming higher education, how that education influenced the many-layered personal and professional identities they formed, and how they engaged in efforts to build women’s networks and claim public political space. These findings indicate several factors deserving greater attention and research in development: the importance of siblings to educational attainment, the utility of interweaving traditional and alternate gendered identities, the value of women’s networks for transformational learning, and the challenges in claiming public political space when elite ownership of development is tacitly accepted. These findings demonstrate that many interwoven strands influence educational outcomes and processes of empowerment above and beyond formal schooling. These effects do not manifest in a linear fashion. When the education-women’s empowerment-development nexus is better understood and grounded in women’s rights, this enhances development outcomes for young women.