Building a Manifesto and Beyond: Creating Impact Through Feminist Research with Women in Bangladesh

Abstract

In this article, the authors reflect on the power of participatory feminist research in supporting gendered knowledges and cultures of equality through a community-based education project working with women construction workers in Sylhet, northern Bangladesh. We consider the impacts of their involvement in feminist qualitative research conducted as part of the Global Gender & Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE) project, an international research, education and capacity building project funded through the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund (2017–2022). We then explore what happened next, between 2022 and 2025, after the official project ended. GlobalGRACE aimed to enhance women’s wellbeing, support self-esteem and confidence building, and promote gender equality with women construction workers from socio-economically marginalised communities. Here we reflect on the ways participant women were able to bring their agency and situated gendered knowledges through their participation to create exhibitions of films and photography, build a Manifesto of Workers Rights, and emerge beyond the project as entrepreneurs, developing a lasting social enterprise supporting over 2800 women. Travelling through the GlobalGRACE project, we thus consider participant women’s experiences as they made this journey from day-labourers on building sites to creating Protity, a women’s social enterprise supporting one another to become independent entrepreneurs running their own small businesses in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

1. Introducing GlobalGRACE

The Global Gender and Cultures of Equality (GlobalGRACE)1 project was a five-year project funded between 2017 to 2022 by the UK government’s Global Challenges Research Fund. Led by co-directors Mark Johnson and Suzanne Clisby through Goldsmiths, University of London, GlobalGRACE brought together 14 international partners involving a team of over 40 academics, researchers, and non-governmental organisation (NGO) practitioners as well as other experts from Asia, Africa, Europe, and North America. GlobalGRACE involved 6 related research projects based in Bangladesh, Brazil, Mexico, the Philippines, South Africa, and the United Kingdom2. Responding to two key UN global Sustainable Development Goals, Gender Equality (SDG5) and Health and Wellbeing (SDG3), our aim from the inception was to investigate global cultures of in/equalities in different contexts and the ways that diverse groups are working to build more equitable futures for themselves and others. GlobalGRACE has been a collaborative effort, developed in partnership with academics and activists around the world, all working through feminist participatory approaches to arts-based praxis and creative activism, with diverse participants, and employing a variety of creative methods. We began with an understanding that links exist between intersecting inequalities and diminished wellbeing and drew on interdisciplinary and multi-sensory methodologies to investigate people’s everyday experience of inequalities and, importantly, the variety of ways that people’s creative practices challenge systems of privilege and engender new possibilities for more equitable ways of living together. This article focuses on the work, both during and beyond, of one of the six projects, ‘Work Package 2’, based in Sylhet, entitled: Women Working in Men’s Worlds: Visualising female construction workers and the quest for more equitable futures in Sylhet, Bangladesh.

The Bangladesh-based project built on longitudinal research with marginalised women and female construction workers in Sylhet (Choudhury 2013) and was led by Tanzina Choudhury based at Shahjalal University of Science and Technology and GlobalGRACE Co-director, Suzanne Clisby then based at Goldsmiths. We also worked with local social development NGO partner, the Institute for Development Affairs (IDEA) led by Nazmul Haque, local researchers and film and photography trainers, MD. Ashraful Bari ‘Ovi’ and Prove Mehedi ‘Joy’, and women’s support worker, Puspa Begum. Through WP2 ‘Women working in men’s worlds’, we explored how collaborative film and photography led and curated by a group of women construction workers can be used to generate public awareness and make visible the intersecting inequalities they face and that shape their everyday struggles for survival (for greater detail see Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b).

Many time-limited research projects are, for a variety of reasons, often unable to continue engagement with project participants beyond the funded project cycle. While we garner valuable knowledges pertaining to processes, dynamics, and impacts during the research, it is more difficult to maintain relationships and continue to support social change beyond that project end date. With this challenge in mind, we designed GlobalGRACE with the intention of trying to build support for longer-term sustainability and research impact from the beginning, both through solid academic foundations working with longstanding collaborators and through embedding strong partnerships with existing partner NGOs in each field site who had the possibility of working with participants as part of their activities beyond the formal funded period. A strength of this article is that we can look beyond the project and explore what happened next. We have been able to maintain ongoing engagement with women participants since the formal project end in 2022 to date, at the time of writing in 2025, and hopefully will continue to do so into the future, something that is not always feasible for many time-limited studies. This has enabled us to observe and support continued project impacts beyond GlobalGRACE and witness the transition through the incredibly difficult periods during the COVID-19 global pandemic (2020–2021) and 2022–2023 floods for many of these women from construction labourers to entrepreneurs running their own small businesses within the wider support network of Protity, the social enterprise created with participants and the research team. Through this longer-term engagement we can see the successes of GlobalGRACE from creating a small-scale community education project to support marginalised women labourers to a movement led by these women that has gathered pace and generated wider participation among women in the city to become the largest women-led social enterprise in Sylhet. Through this process we have evidenced the importance of supporting marginalised women to build confidence and self-esteem, and in so doing, to recognise and value their gendered situated knowledges.

Hence, and as we explain further below, through weekly workshops, initially with a core group of 12, rising to 35, women construction workers (2018–2022), we witnessed women developing self-confidence and esteem. Working collaboratively and holistically with the support of the research team, participant women built lasting friendships and encouraged one another to believe not only that they have a right to speak, but that their voice, their situated knowledges, are valuable and valued (Clisby and Holdsworth 2016; Haraway 1988). As the project developed, the group began to think about what they might do next, how these workshops and how their networks grow further. Hence, through a series of public events and workshops held in Sylhet during 2021–2022, hosted through NGO partner IDEA and organised collaboratively with the research team and women construction worker participants, we encouraged more women from wider socio-economic circles to join the workshops, strengthening networks and expanding aspirations and horizons. Providing space for and encouraging what grew to become a collective of around 70 Sylheti women of different socio-economic and educational backgrounds, some of whom were involved in non-traditional and entrepreneurial endeavors, to come together opened possibilities and imaginaries for women construction workers to envision alternative futures for themselves and their families. Ultimately what we have witnessed has been recognisable positive social change for participant women in their sense of personal wellbeing and also capacity to build greater equalities and enhanced futures for themselves in the face of gendered, socio-cultural and economic marginalisation.

In what follows, initially we provide a brief overview of the research aims and methodological approach before highlighting some of the tangible and less tangible outcomes of the project. We outline some of the creative praxis developed with women construction workers with the GlobalGRACE Bangladesh team, from filmmaking and photography to exhibition-making and beyond to building a Manifesto of Women Construction Workers’ Rights. We then look past the formal project cycle to see what happened next, to the creation of Protity (Wisdom), the participant-led women’s social enterprise that has since nurtured numerous women entrepreneurs (now involving over 2800) across the city.

2. Women Working in ‘Men’s Worlds’: Research Context, Aims and Approaches

In Sylhet, a city to the northeast of Bangladesh, it is by no means the norm but at the same time not wholly unusual for women labourers to work on construction sites to earn a living for themselves and their family, but they do so in defiance of normative patriarchal gender codes. Indeed, being visible bodies, as women-labourers in a male dominated arena and in the socio-cultural context of Bangladesh, comes at a cost and is not without risk (Alam 2021; Choudhury 2013; Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Clisby and Choudhury 2022). Throughout the GlobalGRACE Bangladesh project, our central focus has been on gender-based in/equalities, poverty, health and wellbeing among resource-poor women construction workers who are employed as day labourers on building sites in the city. Our initial core aims through this project were to support participant women construction workers to generate wider public awareness of their lived experiences, situated gendered knowledges and agency through the curation and production of a series of short films, photographic exhibitions and digital media presence. Our underpinning research questions were:

• How does women’s work and visibility in the construction sector challenge existing gender regimes in Bangladesh and globally?
• What does/might equality and well-being look and feel like to women construction workers in Bangladesh?
• When and where do women feel dis/empowered? And how do differences between the women in relation to ethnicity, sexuality, disability/illness, age affect these feelings?
• How can arts-based praxis enable marginalised women construction workers to become more reflexive and agentic knowers?

Foregrounding feminist research methodologies (Clisby and Holdsworth 2016; Haraway 1988; Hesse-Biber 2010) and an intersectionally gendered (Crenshaw 1991, 2017), focus on women construction workers, in responding to and exploring these research questions, interconnected issues of precarious employment, marginalization, gender norms and stereotypes, and gender-based violence emerged (for more detail see Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Clisby and Choudhury 2022). As Choudhury’s (2013) research has previously revealed, and as were the initial core women participants in this study, the overwhelming majority of women construction workers in Sylhet are rural-urban migrants, marginalized through intersections of poverty, class and gender. The women who work on these construction sites tend to lack both formal education, literacy and the more highly valued forms of marketable skills, and as many of them are lone parents or do not have male household members who are able or willing to support them financially, they become construction labourers as a strategic survival strategy to support themselves and their children (Choudhury 2013; Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a).

To contextualise this research, we should explain that our analysis builds on more than a decade of longitudinal qualitative feminist research led by Tanzina Choudhury (see, for example, Choudhury 2013; Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b) with and among resource-poor women and women construction workers in Sylhet, a city with a population of an estimated 1.033 million people in north-eastern Bangladesh (World Population Review 2025). Since 2009, through ethnographic observation, life history interviews, focus groups, and more recently, as part of the GlobalGRACE Project (2017–2022) through feminist qualitative research methods and participatory creative workshops, photography and filmmaking, we have conducted research with a total of 70 female construction workers and resource-poor women and 50 members of their wider families in Sylhet. Our subsequent continued engagement and collaboration with participant women in the city, now through the creation of a women’s social enterprise, moves beyond the funded research period to date. This article thus emerges from a long relationship with relatively marginalised women living and working in Sylhet, and sits within this wider research context.

This study thus draws together interesting dynamics of intersectional gender in/equalities: as construction labourers women work in potentially dangerous and risky environments. As our research has identified and explored, these women workers experience serious health harms, labour exploitation, gender-based discrimination and sexual abuse, all of which can lead to poor physical and mental wellbeing (Choudhury 2013; Choudhury and Clisby 2018; Choudhury et al. 2020). However, we also found that these women simultaneously challenge normative gender codes in Bangladesh pertaining to women’s appropriate roles, employment and public visibility which can generate valuable public debate (Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Clisby and Choudhury 2022). Indeed, and as we have previously argued (Choudhury and Clisby 2020a), women construction workers in this study pose important challenges to normative gender roles and expectations. Their bodies and their labour conflict with normative patriarchal codes of women’s place in society. Indeed, we would go so far as to argue that they constitute an invasion, a border crossing, of female bodies into male space. They challenge dominant ideas about women’s bodily strength and skills by performing all the arduous ‘macho’ labour required on a building site: digging foundations, breaking rocks, carrying heavy loads. They are thus highly visible performers of masculinised labour in the public arena and, as such, their bodies blur the borders of normative constructions of appropriate femininity and masculinity. For these reasons we argue that ‘female construction workers stand at a front line of patriarchy, ‘queering the margins’ of male space, and the radical potential of these ‘border bodies’ must be recognised (Choudhury and Clisby 2020a, p. 182).

The research team worked with a core group of between 12 and 35 women over four years (2018–2022) through weekly day-long workshops. The slight variance in numbers is due to some inevitable fluctuation in participation over time. As explained above, in 2020 and 2021 we worked with this core group to extend the range and numbers of women involved growing the number of participant women up to 70. This larger group of women became the foundation of the women’s social enterprise, Protity, established in 2021–2022. However, the original project began working with a small core group of women construction workers in 2018 and we initially conducted 12 individual life history interviews with each participant of approximately 60 min per in-depth conversation over the first two years of the project as well as numerous informal conversations and group discussions within weekly group workshops with 35 women over an extended period of four years, with some gaps when people were unable to meet, for example due to the global pandemic during 2020 and 2021.

These participants all identified as Bangladeshi women who share a common culture and language, Bangla. Of this original group, the majority identified as Muslim (32) and 3 women were Hindu. Over 90% of participants had originally migrated from rural villages beyond the city in search of work. They were all relatively resource-poor, living in socio-economically marginalised communities in Sylhet. They had limited or no formal education beyond primary level, none had been able to access secondary schooling. In terms of familial relations, almost 40% of women participants were married, living with a male spouse, and had at least one child. However, around half of the women, although technically still married to male spouses, were living alone or in female-headed households with their children as their husbands had left and many had married new wives. Their ages ranged from 24 to 51. As mentioned above, these women were predominantly rural-urban migrants to the city from other districts of Bangladesh. Upon migrating to Sylhet, they all found shelter in more affordable, marginal areas of the city, and particularly in those communities where their relatives, friends or other migrants from their villages had similarly settled. Most women participants did not join the construction sector immediately after migrating to Sylhet. Rather, initially many of these women worked as domestic helpers and subsequently became casual day labourers on construction sites due to this being accessible to them as unskilled work requiring no prior experience or qualifications, but which attracted slightly higher pay than some other unskilled labour available, such as some kinds of domestic work. All had been working in the construction industry as casual labourers for at least two years.

Although some of our key findings and analyses are summarized briefly above, the focus in this article is not on a further analysis of our research questions and findings as we have discussed these elsewhere (Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b; Choudhury et al. 2020; Clisby and Choudhury 2022). Here we focus on our creative praxis and research impact, particularly on positive social and individual experiences and change as we moved through GlobalGRACE and beyond into Protity. In terms of creative praxis, we explored how collaborative film and participatory photography led and curated by women construction workers can be catalysts for women to tell their stories in their own ways, generate greater awareness of their experiences and make visible their everyday struggles and achievements as they inhabit spaces normatively gendered masculine (Choudhury and Clisby 2020b). Participatory film and photography is a method ‘which puts cameras into the hands of participants in order that they document their own lives and experiences, and then uses the resulting images to articulate and communicate those experiences in different ways’ (O’Reilly 2019, p. 105). Aside from using visual methods as a means to enhance participant’s esteem, confidence and skills, and rendering women’s agency and gendered knowledges more visible in the process, we have also found that it can be conducive, feel more sensitive and safer, to talk about difficult issues such as experiences of gender-based violence and sexual harassment, when working through material things As Miller (2008) suggests, it is often easier to ask people to talk through objects and things than to ask people about themselves and difficult situations. Moreover, research drawing on visual image-making can enable people to produce nuanced knowledge about themselves and support forms of self-exploration and inculcate positive self-identities (Byrne et al. 2016; Lykes and Scheib 2016). Our approach was one that takes seriously the potential of participatory visual methods in facilitating the growth of overlapping emotions of care, empathy, wellbeing and, importantly, pleasure. The aims of the project thus extended far beyond the creative endpoints and research findings, we were also concerned through the process to develop transferrable skills, enhance confidence and esteem, and recognise participant’s valuable knowledges as particularly situated women, as workers, mothers, caregivers, and as household and community managers.

Through the weekly workshops, participants were supported and trained in mobile phone-based film making and photography, and they held sessions working through creative material culture and crafts, the specific forms of which they chose, but included pottery, papercraft, and painting. Participants were provided with mobile phones and credit at the outset, and trained in their use. These phones were then their own property. We provided food, refreshments and funding for the day they spent within the research project to ensure that they did not lose a day’s income because, as day labourers, if they did not find work they were not paid. Recording this process was an integral part of the research process, alongside conducting qualitative, life history interviews and ethnographic research with the participants and within their communities. Working slowly together, with the support of the research team, the women participants decided how they wanted to make short films and a digital visual photographic exhibition, what images and narratives they wanted to portray about their lives in their communities and at work on the construction sites.

These workshops also—importantly—became a safe space where women built friendships and support networks, talked about their lives, shared experiences, including exploring difficult issues such as experiences of discrimination and intimate partner violence, and this space became an important source of support. Participants belonged to resource-poor households and, in most cases, they were the only or the most important breadwinners in their family. They had a great deal of work and responsibility and as such they tended to have few opportunities to dwell on their own wellbeing, enjoyment or leisure. In this context, that participant women were able to come together over quite a significant period of time, in weekly bespoke workshops that were tailored to build capacity in different skills that have not been previously so familiar or accessible to them, was all the more important (for detailed analysis and discussion of these participatory methods, see Choudhury and Clisby 2020a).

In thinking analytically about what more is happening through this coming together and collaboration of participant women, Irigaray provided us with a useful way of starting to conceive of women’s bodies as a foundational, if often unrecognised, ‘infrastructure’ of socio-cultural life when she wrote, ‘[w]omen’s bodies through their use, consumption, and circulation provide for the condition making social life and culture possible, although they remain an unknown infrastructure of the elaboration of that social life and culture’ (Irigaray 1977, p. 171). Building on Irigaray’s classic analysis, Clisby has previously articulated and conceptualised the materiality of women’s support networks as ‘embodied infrastructures’ (Clisby and Holdsworth 2016; Clisby 2022; Clisby and Sánchez-Espinosa 2023) both in her work with European feminist academic alliances which, she argues, have become ‘embodied infrastructure, creating powerful networks of support and political engagement on a global scale’ (Clisby 2022, p. 145) and in her research exploring the work of women’s organisations in the UK. Here she talked about the ways through which: ‘women and women’s services act as forms of embodied infrastructure. […] women’s bodies and material actions themselves become the vehicles, the catalysts, the embodied infrastructure, facilitating access to services and enabling change and support through women’s networks. This infrastructure is created through a range of encounters, from those women who act as mentors to other women within their working lives, to the services and formal and informal networks women have established that serve to provide a framework, an infrastructure of support for women’ (Clisby and Holdsworth 2016, p. 7). Through GlobalGRACE, we were similarly able to facilitate a space of mutual support for this group of women, one in which they were able to give themselves permission to enjoy themselves, talk about themselves with one another, develop friendships and take some time out of their daily labour. We would thus argue that this group of women, over the course of the project and beyond into Protity, have also become critically important ‘embodied infrastructures’ of support for one another.

One creative output of this project was a very successful community festival collaboratively organised by women participants for over 300 guests from their local communities, held in Sylhet in February 2020. The purpose of the festival itself was threefold: firstly to support and train participant women in wider transferrable skills development. Participant women learned and led on everything involved in designing, creating, accounting for, organising facilities and catering for, publicising, delivering and hosting a large festival showcasing their own photography and films. This involved significant new skills development, which supported the second aim of the festival which was to build participant women’s confidence and self-esteem, recognising their knowledges, value and potential in ways they may not previously have been encouraged to see in themselves. The third aim of the festival was to showcase women participants’ creative skills and agentic capacities through the exhibition and film screenings for invited family, friends and wider members of participant communities in ways that women could feel rightfully proud of their achievements, and be recognised for their skills by those who matter to them most.

Key to this process was the foundational principle that participants take control of the process, decide what was portrayed, how the films were edited and how their selected photographs were displayed. The team also co-created an exhibition catalogue in which participants selected how their chosen images were displayed, and they were invited to include a short narrative to provide some context about their lives alongside their photography. The research team also curated an additional photographic exhibition with participants that was showcased in Sylhet and transported to Kolkata which provided valuable opportunities for connection with female construction workers in India. There were plans to tour it to Dhaka, Manila and Cape Town but due to the COVID-19 pandemic we instead worked with participant women to create a digital exhibition available online.

3. Building a Manifesto: Women Construction Workers Laying the Foundations for Equality and Justice in Bangladesh

While the project generated wider public impact through the curation and production of the series of short films, photographic exhibitions and digital media presence led and curated by this group of women construction worker participants, what we as researchers had not originally planned was the building of a Workers Manifesto. Through the course of the creative workshops and skills training, women participants shared their lived experiences, talking about their lives, their experiences as women, as mothers, as wives, as workers. They talked about their aspirations and they encouraged one another to recognize their worth, their knowledge and skills which, we witnessed and would argue, supported a growing sense of confidence and self-esteem. These shared experiences grew into shared concerns about their treatment as women labourers on building sites and this slowly led to the emergence of more focused discussion about labour rights and their needs culminating in their decision that they wanted to create their own Workers’ Manifesto of Rights. We supported this development and for a period of several weeks they discussed their experiences as labourers and considered what their demands for change, for their rights, should be. We supported the writing and their design for what eventually became their Workers Manifesto and with project funding we were able to publish their Manifesto in a range of formats—as pamphlets, posters, even on mugs, as well as on the project websites. Launched at an event in Sylhet in 20203, the Manifesto has 14 demands. These demands came from the women construction workers through extended dialogue and debate within their working group during the GlobalGRACE weekly workshops and they honed down their longer lists to the final 14, which were:

• Equal pay for equal work
• Fixed working hours
• Payment for doing overtime
• Financial support for workers in case of accidents
• Government should take measures against sexual harassment at the workplace
• Taking safety measures in the workplace
• One meal a day from the recruiter
• Two short breaks in between work
• Issuing special cards for the workers to protect them from unwanted harassment
• Low-cost housing facilities
• Access to pure drinking water and sanitation facilities
• Ensuring that the contractors give workers the promised wages
• Promoting gender equality at all levels
• Establishing a labour welfare board.

These 14 demands within their Worker’s Manifesto speak volumes about these women’s experiences and socio-economic context, both in their personal lives within their homes and communities and as construction labourers on building sites. Many of these demands are basic rights we should be able to expect in any workplace, such as access to clean water and sanitation facilities, and being given the wages promised. Some of these demands speak to wider concerns for greater socio-cultural and gender equality and welfare provision. Demand 9 calling for the ‘issuing [of] special ID cards for the workers to protect them from unwanted harassment’, for example, relates to wider hegemonic normative gender expectations in the Bangladeshi socio-cultural context whereby women walking to and from the workplace in the public sphere, early morning and late at night, can be subject to verbal, physical and sexual harassment by men in the street as gendered bodies out of place (Choudhury 2013; Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a; Hossen 2020). The message here is that women should not be working in the ‘man’s world’ of construction, women should not be walking alone through the city streets, and those who are caught doing so must therefore be disreputable women, even possibly sex workers, and as such legitimate targets for harassment by men who are upholding the normative patriarchal values of society (Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020b; Hossen 2020; Kabeer 1997, 2000).

A value of this Manifesto of Worker’s Rights is that it has grown through women construction worker’s lived experiences as day labourers on building sites in Sylhet. It is thus built on their situated knowledge, emerging from the ground, the soil, dust and rocks on which they work. Here we summarise a few of these experiences as women have recounted them to us and one another through the workshops and discussions, experiences that became the foundations of their Manifesto. As women they know that they receive lower wages than men even when they do what they can see is work of equal value: labour that they know is of equal risk and commanding equal skills in construction, but not equally recognised as such due to their gender. Their payments are often delayed and they rarely receive additional money for doing extra work. They work in their saris, barelegged and barefooted, without helmets, boots, gloves, glasses or any protective gear. Their skin becomes cracked, sore and burned from the lime and concrete dust. They feel their faces and bodies ageing, even through they are still young. They have witnessed numerous accidents and experienced injuries themselves. They have seen workers seriously harmed and even killed through accidents on construction sites, but not receive noteworthy compensation. They face gendered discrimination at work through differential treatment. They speak of male labourers being allowed to take breaks but they are reprimanded, shouted at by male supervisors for doing so. They speak of sexual harassment at work, threats of violence, and experiences of sexual assault. Women construction workers work long hours on sites doing hard physical labor and are frequently hungry. Buying food and bottled water at work is unaffordable for most day labourers. They experience sexual and verbal harassment from men they try to pass unnoticed, even from policemen, as they walk home through the city streets in the dark. They are accused of being sex workers because they are walking home alone at night and accosted with demands for sexual services. These experiences led them to include the demand for ID cards which they felt might then bestow them with proof of their status, and, they hope, some respect, as ‘workers’. All these feelings, these experiences, were shared and articulated, and honed down into their final Manifesto.

What this Manifesto also illustrates to us are the ways these women are agentic situated knowers (Haraway 1988; Clisby and Holdsworth 2016), who understand all too well their particular locatedness within wider patriarchal socio-cultural and economic contexts as marginalised women workers in Bangladesh. The Manifesto continues to be disseminated, and we have tried to actively encourage key employers and policy makers to take their rights on board through a series of engagement meetings and events across the city and through a range of NGO networks in Bangladesh. We were also able to disseminate their Manifesto during an exhibition and workshop held with women constructions workers in Kolkata, India, in March 20204. This small group of Indian women construction labourers shared similar experiences and similarly wished to adopt the Manifesto because they felt that it resonated so strongly with them. Thus far, however, we have not seen significant structural change in employer attitudes, or the introduction of the Manifesto demands into policy but some awareness has been raised and the Manifesto has become a vehicle for public debate and dialogue with employers in the sector and promoted by NGOs. Change happens very slowly, and any visible absence of tangible social change in working conditions since their demands does not detract from the value of the efforts women collectively made to create their Manifesto of Workers Rights.

4. Building Confidence, Enhancing Wellbeing, Having Fun: More on Methods, Methodologies and the Power of Emotion in Social Research

As we have explained above, the focus of GlobalGRACE Bangladesh was largely on community-based education and feminist participatory research to support women’s wellbeing and enhanced esteem through the vehicle of skills training and arts through mobile phone-based film and photography. The value of community-based education as a means to enhance participant confidence and self-esteem has been widely recognised across diverse socio-cultural contexts (see, for example, Hill and King 1995; Kinuthia 2018; McCalman et al. 2010; Peerbhoy et al. 2020; Romijnders et al. 2017). The GlobalGRACE project was also about the importance of non-formal community-based education and the benefits this can bring to marginalised groups in often fragile contexts (Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a, 2020b). Moreover, as with all GlobalGRACE research, here we tried to bring feminist, participatory, and paid attention to decolonial methodological approaches and creative praxis to our work.

Our approach is thus one that takes seriously the position of research participants as ‘situated knowers’ whose knowledge is embedded within socio-cultural, historical and political contexts, reflecting our lived experiences. (Haraway 1988; Hawkesworth 1989; Manning 2021). We are all gendered beings who are “knowers situated in relation to what is known and experienced by both themselves and in relation to other knowers. What is known, and the way that it is known, thereby reflects the situation or perspective of the knower. This is itself legitimate knowledge” (Clisby and Holdsworth 2016, p. 4). Hence, from a feminist, and drawing on a decolonial perspective, we recognise this knowledge as valued and valuable. As Manning (2021, p. 1204) has argued, ‘[d]ecolonial feminist theory values all knowledge and lived experiences […] and in so doing provides a new framework within the geopolitics of knowledge production, one that demands respect for the pluralization of differences’. Moreover, a decolonial feminist theory not only values situated knowledges and lived experiences, but endeavors to locate, listen and foreground non-hegemonic voices, particularly of women and marginalised groups in Global South contexts. Thus, in line with Lugones’ (2010) articulation of decolonial feminist theory, we draw on this framing here as a way to de-centre hegemonic ‘Western’, ‘colonial’ ways of seeing and explore, understand and foreground the experiences, knowledges and perspectives of non-hegemonic groups, in this case, the situated knowledges of resource poor women construction workers in northern Bangladesh.

When thinking about what feminist research means to us, as women academics belonging to both Global South and Northern geographies and cultures, it is a way of being, seeing and doing that is imbued in our lives and selves within and beyond our academic labour. Being a feminist researcher is about, as Ahmed has articulated, ‘living a feminist life’ which: “might mean asking ethical questions about how to live better in an unjust and unequal world (in a not-feminist and antifeminist world); how to create relationships with others that are more equal; how to find ways to support those who are not supported or are less supported by social systems; how to keep coming up against histories that have become concrete, histories that have become as solid as walls” (S. Ahmed 2017, p. 1). So, to be a feminist researcher is to be feminist, and here, in articulating what that means, Menon’s words come to mind:

‘To be a feminist is to understand that different identities—located hierarchically as dominant or subordinate—are produced at different times and in different spaces, but also to be aware particularly of the processes of gendering. By ‘gendering’ I mean the ways in which people are produced as ‘proper’ men and women through rules and regulations of different sorts; some of which we internalize, some which have to be violently enforced. To be a feminist is to recognize that, apart from gender-based injustice, there are multiple structural inequalities that underlie the social order, and to believe that change is possible, and to work for it at whichever level possible’ (Menon 2012, p. ix).

In line with our feminist methodological approach, we were also concerned to acknowledge, understand and try to mitigate power imbalances between researchers and participants, beginning with the experiences and standpoint of the women with whom we are working (Oakley 2015; Hesse-Biber 2010; Maynard 1994; Clisby and Holdsworth 2016). As discussed above, we also align our methodological approach to the decolonial feminist framing articulated by Lugones (2010). Decolonial feminist theory has extended Haraway’s (1988) feminist epistemological approach to situated knowing, and, as Lugones (2010, p. 174) articulates; “[d]ecolonizing gender is necessarily a praxical task. It is to enact a critique of racialized, colonial, and capitalist heterosexualist gender oppression as a lived transformation of the social. As such it places the theorizer in the midst of people in a historical, peopled, subjective/intersubjective understanding of the oppressing←→resisting relation at the intersection of complex systems of oppression. To a significant extent it has to be in accord with the subjectivities and intersubjectivities that partly construct and in part are constructed by “the situation”. It must include “learning” peoples. Furthermore, feminism does not just provide an account of the oppression of women. It goes beyond oppression by providing materials that enable women to understand their situation without succumbing to it.”

Throughout our work we also acknowledge the role and importance of pleasure and emotion in participatory research and creative praxis (Choudhury and Clisby 2020a). As Holland (2007) has argued, emotions are significant and essential in the production of knowledge and facilitate understandings, analyses and interpretations of data. Hubbard et al. (2001, p. 119) also recognise the power of emotion in social research for both researcher and participants, arguing that, “unless emotion in research is acknowledged, not only will researchers be left vulnerable, but our understandings of the social world will remain impoverished”. Similarly, Feldman and Mandache (2019, p. 229) highlight the value of “emotional overlap” in research encounters which they define as points when both researcher and participant “converge in intimate episodes of confession, understanding, and empathy” while simultaneously recognising the structurally different subject positions of researchers and participants. Attending to overlapping emotions and being sensitive to contextual positionalities enhances our understandings of our situated knowledges and can enrich these research encounters, as Hubbard et al. (2001, p. 35) suggest, “[t]he greatest challenge facing researchers is not about developing research teams where emotional labour can be successfully managed, but about recognizing that emotions have epistemological significance. Being emotional is a way of knowing about, and acting in, the social world and is just as significant for how we make sense of our respondents’ experiences as our cognitive skills. By acknowledging the role of emotionally-sensed knowledge in our research teams we may be able to further our understandings of the social world”.

Indeed, and as we have argued elsewhere (Choudhury and Clisby 2020a), the creative workshops became spaces of emotion and pleasure. All the women participants agreed that in the contexts of their often challenging and hard-working daily lives in socio-economically marginalised contexts, they are rarely able to create space for themselves, for their own enjoyment. The workshops facilitated that, albeit temporally limited, space to breathe, and as Fulon said, “It’s like oxygen”. Naju told us how she enjoys being able to “steal some time for herself” away from other work and household labour, as she explained:

“I have come here leaving my household chores […] I felt drawn towards the workshop here. My daughters were insisting [that I do] not come here, leaving the task [food preparation] for them to carry out. I convinced them it will not take much time. Then I came, now I have grown used to it. I told my daughters [that] we gossip and make fun over there [in the workshops]. If I don’t come, I don’t feel good. My daughter said gossiping idly is always enjoyable. Getting acquainted with new people is also enjoyable. A kind of affectionate environment has developed. I have told everyone at my home that I will get a mobile phone. My sons laughed at me hearing this, saying that I cannot hold a phone let alone take photographs. I said I will take everyone’s photographs, whoever I meet outside. Apa [referring to the research team coordinator] will give our pictures in television [referring to the mobile phone-based films participants also make]. We make jests about these at home”.

(Age 46, mother of 5, married)

Shikha said she felt valued and visible when she came to the workshops, that “I can talk a lot about myself, which I like” and they became a place she could be who she wanted to be and meet other women like herself:

“Here everyone speaks nicely. In our slum people talk to each other disrespectfully. In fact, they do not know how to say things in a pleasant way without using harsh or vulgar words. They keep asking me about the workshop and tell me to wear a burqah [full body covering] while commuting to the workshop venue. I do not reply, just smile back at my neighbours. I will not be able to make them understand that it feels so good to me to be treated nicely in the workshops and how this helps me to think positively about my future”.

(Age 43, mother of 2 daughters, separated)

Rozina explained that she had long desired to have a “touch mobile phone” of her own and:

“[I]n our workshops, I am told by our trainers to use a smart phone without fear and they keep saying ‘nothing will happen to the phone and if something happens, we will fix it. You don’t worry’. This opportunity to handle a smart phone and encouragement and assurance on the part of the trainers and researchers gives me immense happiness”.

(Extracts from Choudhury and Clisby 2020a, pp. 48–50)

There are, always, of course, ethical dimensions to acknowledge and understand in any research process, and as a means to articulate some of our thinking around ethics we draw here from a narrative we wrote in 2020 where we reflected on the ethics of the relationships we developed with the women with whom we were working through the project (Choudhury and Clisby 2020a, p. 55). As we reflected then, and do so again now, our project has enabled group of people to come together over a significant period of time, in research terms at least, and we think that much has been gained—friendships, confidence, esteem as well as new knowledge, insights and skills. But this has in turn facilitated our access to these participant women’s everyday experiences of joy, sadness, pleasure and dreams. As researchers, this is good for us, it is good for our research, and it is also important that these women have a space to speak about themselves and their lived experiences, so we believe it to be a positive experience for the participants as well as for ourselves. However, it also brings legitimate ethical concerns. We do not want to exploit the women who agreed to share so much with us, we do not want to have developed these bonds only to extract their life stories. It is a delicate ethical tight rope we walk. However, we are also well aware that power is complex and not simplistically experienced or exchanged—these women have power and forms of capital in ways that we do not. We are privileged to be involved in a small part of these participants’ lives and also privileged (as academic researchers we have greater social, cultural, economic and educational capital, to evoke Bourdieu 1986) to be able to facilitate their access to a space where they can spend some time with other women, some time for themselves, in empathy, with pleasure and joy, albeit for a limited period of time. We believe it has been a mutually beneficial research encounter in many different and nuanced ways. But, as we note above, what remains when the project ends? We think this group of women will take something positive away from their experience of working with us—they tell us as much—and we know that we take away more than data, that we have found a great deal of pleasure in getting to know this group of women. We acknowledge the power and politics of that privileged positioning in this complex interplay of overlapping emotions.

In this reflection, back in the midst of the COVID-19 global pandemic, we did not yet know what would emerge after the project. In the next section we reflect on what happened next, the impacts of GlobalGRACE that went far beyond our expectations, and the power of women’s collective action.

5. Beyond the Manifesto: Building the Social Enterprise

As we have explained, one of the aims of GlobalGRACE was to enhance confidence and esteem and develop transferrable skills to support wider employment opportunities beyond construction labouring for the women participants. Over time, as their confidence grew and friendships developed within the group, women began to talk about what other work they could do, how else they might earn a living, and how to escape the harmful environment of the building sites. Ideas about making significant changes in direction took time to percolate and transition from hopeful aspirations into more concrete aims, but, through ongoing discussions with and between participants and the research team, the group began to develop tangible ideas to create some structures to support entrepreneurship and small business enterprise. The idea to develop a women’s social enterprise thus germinated over time but emerged more concretely in 2021, during the COVID-19 pandemic, as a response to the new situation they faced with the closure of construction sites and loss of livelihoods. During this time, working with women participants, the GlobalGRACE team tried to adapt quickly to do what little we could to offer support to women and their families to meet immediate survival needs and to keep the channels of communication and networks open, largely via their mobile phones. The enforced pause in construction work focused attention towards alternative futures and the importance of supporting the diversification of income generation strategies for women participants was further reinforced when, in 2022 and 2023, Sylhet experienced devastating flooding and people of all social classes were again, as during the pandemic, trapped in their homes, struggling to find food or clean drinking water, and largely unable to make a living.

What emerged through continued discussions and dialogues with women participants eventually concretised into the idea to create a network to support women’s social enterprise. To facilitate this transition towards building new enterprises and beginning with an event held in September 20215, we organised a number of training workshops for participant women about how to set up small businesses. To support participant women’s ability to envision building their own small business, we saw the need for role models and examples of existing women’s entrepreneurship. As such we next made connections with a few women entrepreneurs and small business owners in the city and brought them together with participant women construction workers through an invited event, providing entertainment, food and showcasing the films and photography of the women construction workers. Our aim was to create some forms of engagement and sense of solidarity among women of different socio-cultural contexts in the city in the hope that they could work together, mentor one another and develop an entrepreneurial network. As a result, they created a group called Protity, both virtually via Facebook, which was the digital platform most familiar to some of the women, and materially, consisting of women already involved in private enterprises and women construction workers. Surprisingly quickly, the number of women involved in Protity grew beyond all expectations and in 2025 includes around 2800 women.

Women involved in Protity include a range of small business-women who have shared their experiences with construction workers and other socio-economically marginalised women participants of setting up their business and of buying and selling goods, such as vegetables and produce in a local market predominantly managed by women. Through dialogue and discussion with women participants we developed a programme of training in areas they felt they could develop into a social enterprise. The main areas of training requested and deemed most viable by women, largely due to gendered familiarity with these normatively feminised arenas, were in food and drink preparation for sale, making local snacks such as parata, singara, somucha, dalpuri and other local pithas. Through a gradual process of training workshops and organising gatherings and events with the wider network of women entrepreneurs in the city, women participants developed confidence and expertise in setting up their own small businesses. This opened up possibilities for alternative livelihoods and they were able to support one another in their collective transition into exploring and developing new livelihoods.

Inevitably, the process was not without challenges. Most of the participant women construction workers had not had the opportunity to complete formal education, and none beyond primary level, indeed most had little or no literacy in reading or writing, and they had limited socio-economic capital, which is what led them to become informal day labourers in the first place, so this was a significant transition. There also continue to persist normative patriarchal gender codes which continue to dictate the roles women and men are expected to take in the workplace (Feldman 1992; Kabeer 1997, 2000, 2007; Choudhury and Clisby 2018, 2020a; Hossen 2020). According to these normative gender codes in Bangladesh, it is not perceived as acceptable or permissible for women to work in ‘masculinised jobs’ as street vendors, delivery people, bike riders or rickshaw drivers (Jahan 2024). However, let us not forget that these women have already stretched the boundaries of gendered expectations by being visible female bodies on building sites, something we suggest continues to be a rare sight in most parts of the world. Indeed, as we have argued above, these women visibly perform masculinised labour in the public arena and in so doing they already challenge normative constructions of appropriate femininity and masculinity (Choudhury and Clisby 2020b).

Although female employment in Bangladesh has increased gradually since 1990 when labour force participation rates were just under 25% for women (World Bank 2025), labour force participation rates continue to remain comparatively low, standing at 44.2% in 2024 compared with 80.9% for men (World Bank 2025). In Bangladesh day-care centres and elderly care facilities remain relatively uncommon and still tend to be perceived as culturally inappropriate (Akter et al. 2025; Sarker et al. 2023). It is also more usual for young children to be cared for within the family home rather than through external childcare provision (Ahmed and Zubayer 2024; Zhang et al. 2020). Similarly, although there is an increase in popularity and availability of store-bought ready-made food, especially in larger urban centres and among younger more affluent sectors (M. R. Ahmed 2023), these goods are neither affordable nor usual for most families in Sylhet. As a result, there continues to be significant demand for women’s labour in these feminised sectors of care work, domestic labour and food preparation. Despite being normatively feminised, undervalued and poorly paid forms of labour, these roles nevertheless can, although not always, offer better wages and are significantly less dangerous than construction day-labouring work. As such, the majority of women participants eventually found their niche in one of these sectors, but with the added advantage of creating and managing their own small businesses offering services in these areas. They were becoming their ‘own boss’ which provided them with a far greater sense of power, autonomy and confidence, as Amena, now a successful vegetable vendor, narrates:

“My husband had been an abusive man since the beginning, he never showed respect to me. At [my former] workplace, I also did not get respect as I am a woman. There are some men who always shout at women, utter abusive words for women as they cannot say anything to men. After starting my own enterprise, I do not pay any heed to anyone. I do what I feel right. I asked my husband to leave my house as I could no longer endure his violence and infidelity. Now no one shouts at me; neither at home nor at work. I do things in my own way. I am responsible for my own action and I love that. My children also understand that I have regained my inner strength and they have to respect me and my work”.

(Age 49, mother of 3 sons, separated)

In the joint workshops held within the offices of partner NGO IDEA in Sylhet for construction workers and women entrepreneurs, these small business owners became a significant source of inspiration for the women construction workers. During the workshops the women entrepreneurs talked about their everyday lived experiences, discussing their challenges, struggles, and successes as women in a male-dominated world. They spoke candidly about how they overcame many obstacles both within and outside their home, providing valuable insights that helped the women construction workers to develop confidence in envisioning their own potential futures as entrepreneurs.

The project has continued to grow over the past few years since we began this redirection in 2021–2022 and while GlobalGRACE initially began in 2018 with a small group of 12 women working in the construction sector, the project gradually expanded to welcome socio-economically marginalised women in the city who were not directly involved in construction work and an increasing number of women small business owners, now involving over 2800 women. Having provided training for participants in mobile-phone-based film-making and photography, and in event management, women were now supported through the Protity collective to use their mobile phones and the transferrable skills they had learned to focus on business development and management with the support of a wider network of women entrepreneurs with greater levels of socio-economic capital at their disposal and with skills and experience in working both off and online. Although the socio-economically marginalised women participants often possessed the skills to produce hand made goods, particularly food items, they tended to have less initial experience and knowledge of product marketing and online sales. Hence, we witnessed a beautiful dynamic emerging, whereby women from different sectors of Sylheti society came together to share valuable knowledge and expertise, helping to make the new enterprises more successful. In what follows we provide a few illustrative insights into the experiences of six women participants, narrated by these women but then transposed into these vignettes by us, who have embarked on new careers as entrepreneurs.

5.1. Ranu

Ranu had been working in the construction sector as a casual worker for almost 15 years and her health was suffering. She wanted a new direction and with the support of GlobalGRACE and then through Protity the idea developed to create the first women-led goods delivery service in Sylhet. In 2022, the concept of delivery women was completely new in Sylhet. Recognizing the growth of Protity and the proliferation of women’s small businesses, we could see that these entrepreneurs needed more delivery persons to reach their customers. As such, the project team supported Ranu to train with a small group of women construction worker participants to become delivery personnel.

This initiative represented a groundbreaking step in introducing women to this traditionally masculine field in the conservative social context of Sylhet. Interestingly, despite being leaders in their field and challenging normative gendered expectations and stereotypes themselves, several women entrepreneurs were initially sceptical about women’s capacity to become delivery people as this was strongly perceived as a man’s role. However, although they expressed some doubts about the success of this initiative, they nevertheless said they welcomed the potential for women to break into this male domain. The Protity delivery women have thus far successfully built the first women-led delivery business and continue to visibly defy gender norms as they journey through the city taking women’s business products to their customers. They work in pairs or small groups for safety and walk or take autorickshaws to deliver orders from women’s businesses to customers around the city. The next step could be for women to own and drive the autorickshaws themselves, but that may be something to look forward to in the future. Here Ranu talks about her initial involvement with the project:

“Had [GlobalGRACE] project team not supported us during COVID-19 period I really think some of us would have already been in graves. Since then, I think that what the project people suggest, they do it for our wellbeing. That’s why when they approached me to become a delivery person, I did not disagree. Although initially I felt nervous and was not sure whether I would be able to carry out such responsibilities, the project team boosted my confidence saying that ‘you know all the nooks and corners of the city, you can do it very well’. I trusted them and prepared myself for the new endeavour”.

(Age 50, mother of 2, separated)

5.2. Sukhera

Sukhera, the eldest participant in the GlobalGRACE project, now in her 50s, had worked in the construction sector for almost 35 years. However, she found it increasingly challenging to continue the physically demanding work as a day labourer but financial necessity made it seem impossible for her to leave the building sites, at least not without alternative employment. Through her involvement with the GlobalGRACE project and beyond into Protity, Sukhera envisioned and crystallised the possibility of a different future and she was supported to start a small business near her home. She decided she could become a street vendor, despite normative gender codes which deem this to be ‘men’s work’. As we have discussed above, being visible women workers in ‘male’ domains is not without risk, however, as Sukhera said, she had been abused for being a female construction worker for decades, but she had persisted, so “what difference will it make now if I get abuse for being a street vendor?” She said she was committed to the change of direction and we were able to provide a small grant to support the initial set up for her business which she used to buy a cart to transport and display her goods and a scale to weigh the products. She started her business selling affordable vegetables and dry fish (locally known as shutki). Her primary customers were people within her neigbourhood from similar poorer socioeconomic backgrounds.

At the beginning she said she felt apprehensive about her new venture, feeling awkward selling products in her community, often to people she knew. However, she felt her confidence grow after participating in workshops with other women as part of the research project. The, through Protity she had support from both her fellow participants and from more experienced businesswomen and she felt encouraged to keep pursuing her new enterprise. After a few weeks of running her street vendor business from her cart, she said that she had developed in confidence and adjusted to her new routine. She said she did not think she could have made the transitions without the women’s group through which she gained practical insights from other women entrepreneurs in the group, who shared valuable tips and strategies.

Sukhera’s transition from construction work to small scale entrepreneurship significantly improved her quality of life. She no longer had to endure the physical toil and dangers of construction work. She spends hours on her new business, yet the flexible hours allow her to tailor her schedule to her own family needs and she has learned how to capitalise on customer demand, identifying peak shopping hours of the day and quieter times, enabling her to manage her time well. Sukhera’s new journey as a small businesswoman has not only provided her with greater financial security, but she says that she values her autonomy, has a sense of power and control over her life. She says she is a happier and more confident woman today, and explained:

“In construction work aged women, men also, become redundant. No one wants to take them to work as they become weak and less productive. I am happy that I am running my own business now. I do not need to prove to others every morning that I am still strong and I can work hard the way I did before”.

(Age 52, mother, married)

5.3. Sufia

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the government of Bangladesh restricted people’s movement in public sphere to curb the spread of the virus, leaving many working people, including women engaged in the construction sector, without paid work. Consequently, Sufia (aged 42, married and a mother), as with many people, had to find alternative sources of income to survive. For a couple of months, Sufia tried to work as a domestic helper due to the unavailability of construction work but she found many apartments restricted entry into their compounds during the pandemic and so she found it difficult to secure any work in that sector. Through discussions with the research team and women’s group she recognised that she was good at making food, particularly popular snacks she could sell, such as parata, roti, vaji, singara, and tea.

The project facilitated a training program for Sufia and a few other participants pairing them with a women entrepreneurs who provided instructions on preparing snacks professionally and in compliance with hygiene regulations. With the support of our small start-up grant, Sufia was able to rent a shop near her home to set up a tea stall. With this initial investment, she furnished her tea stall with basic amenities, including a few benches for customer seating, a stand fan to cool the customers during hot weather, and a small refrigerator. In addition to her home-made food items, Sufia expanded her business by selling complementary products she bought wholesale (such as buns, toast biscuits, puffed rice balls, betel nuts and leaves, sada and jardah, water and soft drinks). Her tea stall has been successful, attracting an increasing number of customers, especially for parata, vaji and tea.

Sufia’s new enterprise has also brought her family closer together. She explained that her previously “reluctant and annoyed” husband started helping her by preparing tea and managing the cash box. Her children help her in cleaning dishes, carrying water and other minor tasks. This transformation became possible when her husband observed Sufia’s progress in her managing small business. Sufia told us that he appeared to feel threatened by the possibility that, if he had neither supported her nor attempted to restrain her activities, she might ‘no longer obey his authority’. Through weekly meetings Sufia encountered other women who had severed ties with abusive husbands and achieved success by relying on their own capabilities. As Sufia explained, she believes that her husband’s latent fear of ‘losing his authority’ and being ‘abandoned’ ultimately compelled him to collaborate with her in running the stall. Moreover, as a result of her new enterprise, she says that not only has she grown in confidence, but she also feels that her husband treats her with greater respect. Indeed, she explained that rather than being under his authority, she has ‘allowed him’ to remain in the household and she now has greater power over decision-making. The tea stall has thus become a family venture, providing them with a higher level of financial stability and is, Sufia says, a “source of strength and hope for a better future”.

Through her new business enterprise, Sufia has gained confidence, visibilised her knowledge and skills and redefined her role, status and power within her household. One could argue that, to some extent at least, she has subverted normative gendered expectations and challenged the patriarchal control of her husband. Sufia is now dreaming of further expansion of her tea stall. She says she aims to save money to buy a large internet TV for the stall as she believed offering customers more entertainment might bring in more business and she also plans to diversify her menu by investing more money and incorporating additional food items. With her growing confidence and the support of Protity and of her family, including the new-found support of her husband, she says that she is determined to grow her business and secure a better future for her and her children.

5.4. Shamima

Shamima (aged 46, mother of 2 daughters, married) came to Protity as a small businesswoman to share her expertise with women construction workers at the behest of the research team. She had started selling cakes and frozen snacks from home, not out of economic necessity as she already had greater socio-economic security and capital through her family, but as a way to pursue her passion for baking. However, Shamima was initially rather hesitant to promote her small business more publicly. Through the creation of the women’s enterprise group, Protity, and the group’s Facebook page, women could now showcase and share information about their small businesses, post pictures and descriptions of their current or upcoming products, and take online orders. Shamima became an active member, using the platform to share pictures of her food items and she gained greater visibility within and beyond the group.

To further extend support to emerging entrepreneurs, like Shamima, the research team organized an exhibition specifically for women who had not yet come forwards as visible women entrepreneurs. This exhibition provided an opportunity for these women to showcase their talents without the financial obstacles of high stall fees typically associated with such events. Shamima, for the first time, participated in this exhibition, bringing a variety of homemade items, such as cookies, cakes, puddings, samucha, pitha and pickles. Her home-made products received much appreciation and as a result her venture gained several loyal clients who became regular patrons. Shamima always acknowledges Protity’s support in augmenting her business and says that Protity played a pivotal role in building her confidence and encouraging her to engage in the public sphere. Today, Shamima says that she has developed in confidence and now sees herself, and has become recognised, as a successful entrepreneur. She has a sound client base and has grown her business, generating enough capital to independently travel to participate in other exhibitions and events to extend her reach.

5.5. Tohura

Tohura, a woman in her mid-forties, faced significant difficulties after losing her husband at an early age and bringing up their young daughter as a widow. In Bangladesh it is common for widows, especially those who are young and from resource-poor families to be expected and pressured into remarriage to remain under the guardianship of a man. However, the children of a previous marriage are not always welcomed into a new household (Choudhury et al. 2020). With both of her parents deceased, her elder brother assumed the role of her guardian. However, due to his precarious financial situation, he was reluctant to take responsibility for Tohura and her daughter, and he exerted pressure on her to remarry. Tohura however did not perceive remarriage as her preferred solution to her financial problems, and she was afraid a new husband might not accept her child, so she secretly left her village home and travelled to Sylhet with her daughter, seeking refuge with one of her friends who had migrated to the city and who was earning her livelihood there. Initially she stayed at her friend’s house and started working as a domestic help. After a few weeks, she moved into a rented home within the same resource-poor neighbourhood and little by little saved some money to start her own business. She began selling traditional Bangladeshi snacks, such as teler pitha and nakshi pitha, on the street.

Through contact with the research team, Tohera was introduced to Protity and we were able to provide her with a mobile phone to support her in expanding her business. Women within Protity helped her to learn how to use their Facebook page to advertise her business. Through this collaboration, Tohura started receiving more orders and expanding her consumer base. The smartphone proved instrumental in enabling Tohura to communicate with more customers, receive orders, and coordinate deliveries. Over the past couple of years, her business has grown noticeably, allowing her to achieve socioeconomic security and personal satisfaction. She says she feels more “powerful, secure, happy I was not forced into remarriage” and “content with life”.

5.6. Ayesha

Ayesha (29 years old, mother of a son, widow) comes from what she describes as a “middle-class family”, and at the time of her marriage she was an undergraduate student aspiring to pursue postgraduate education at a university of her choice. However, her conservative father restricted her from studying far from the small town in which they were living. After her marriage, Ayesha attempted to continue her studies while managing household responsibilities. Although her husband was supportive, she found it more difficult to maintain her education, and more so when she became a mother. Shortly after the birth of their child, her husband died in an accident, and she was left feeling “emotionally and financially vulnerable”.

After her husband’s sudden death, Ayesha returned to her parental home, as she lacked resources to support herself and her young child. However, she felt her father was growing increasingly resentful of their presence and wanted her to remarry. Despite his strong disapproval, Ayesha graduated and sought employment to support herself and her son. Her father, however, remained resistant to her pursuit of independence, and instead he tried to arrange another marriage for her. Ayesha feared that if she remarried she would lose her son as, as explained above, it is not uncommon in some sectors of society for women to be prevented from bringing their children from a previous marriage into a new marital home (Choudhury et al. 2020).

A turning point came when Ayesha found the Protity Facebook page and found out more about the GlobalGRACE project through the project websites. Encouraged by a friend, she travelled to Sylhet from her village to participate in one of the exhibitions organised by the research team and Protity women’s group to promote women’s small businesses. Ayesha had an idea to develop a business selling clothing made by the Monipuri indigenous community, famous for traditional weaving techniques. She felt anxious about the outcome and she was uncertain whether her products would sell or if she would be able to cover the costs of her travel and subsistence.

During the exhibition, Ayesha met other women entrepreneurs and potential clients who showed interest in her products. The research team supported her business development through a small start-up grant to help cover her participation expenses in different exhibitions and she was offered further support for her wellbeing through counselling with women psychologists who are also affiliated with Protity. With this support, Ayesha expanded her business and began selling products online. However, competition from other sellers working with similar product lines kept her profits low. Determined to improve her prospects as an entrepreneur, Ayesha sought to acquire new skills in catering to enhance her income. The research team and women’s group were able to support her accommodation in Sylhet and finance her training in catering, hospitality and hotel management. Upon completion of her training, she has developed a particular interest in professional cake baking and has been supported in further specialised training in this field. Reflecting on her journey, Ayesha told us:

“Before joining this group, I never dared to book a stall to display my products in any exhibition. I was scared of not being able to make profit or at least minimize my losses. I not only got the opportunity to showcase my products and connect with a new customer base, but I also developed skills in the culinary sector. Without family support and a personal income, I would not have been able to access the training I received. This project required nothing in return; instead, it encouraged me to work hard and achieve something for myself. Now, I feel confident that I can work in the bakery section of a large bakery or as a chef in a prominent hotel. If I gain my father’s permission, I even aspire to establish my own bakery”.

It is telling that Ayesha still feels that she needs her father’s permission to establish her own bakery business, despite having managed to defy his authority in escaping remarriage and the possible loss of her son, to graduate from university, and leave her small town to train in her chosen field, all against her father’s wishes. But in the persistently patriarchal context of society, it is not surprising that her father continues to play some role in her choices—or at least maintain the impression that he might.

6. Conclusions

Throughout this article we have reflected on the value of participatory feminist research, aligned with a decolonial positioning, working through community-based education with women construction workers in Sylhet, northern Bangladesh, in supporting gendered knowledges and cultures of equality through the GlobalGRACE project and beyond to the creation of Protity. We have considered the ways participant women brought their agency and situated gendered knowledges to the project and supported one another to enhance their confidence, wellbeing and to learn new skills to create professional exhibitions of films and photography, to then build a Manifesto of Workers Rights, and subsequently emerge beyond the project as entrepreneurs, developing a lasting social enterprise now supporting over 2800 women. For both researchers and participants, we believe that involvement in the GlobalGRACE project and the Protity initiative has been an enriching experience, but of course, the journey has not been without challenges.

When conducting academic research, we are often limited in extending our research and participation beyond the funded project cycle for various understandable practical and logistical reasons. Here we are in the privileged position to be able to provide insights into what happened with and between participant women after the research funding officially ended. Indeed, it has been a privilege for us to bring together academics, NGO practitioners and women participants over this extended period of time, and through two very difficult global health and environmental disasters. We have worked hard together, with commitment and resilience, and it has paid dividends. Sufia challenged her husband’s patriarchal attitudes and controlling behaviour, and through her own business enterprise, she has created new livelihoods for her whole household. Shamina has employed more women in her growing bakery business. Ranu is joined by more women in their groundbreaking women-only delivery business. Ayesha was supported with counselling and training to become an expert in her chosen culinary field. Both Ayesha and Tohera defied male guardians’ gendered expectations for them and managed to exert greater autonomy over their lives, keep their children with them and become entrepreneurs with the support of the women’s network. Powerful coalitions have been forged between women of different classes and backgrounds across the city.

One conclusion we can take away from the experiences of GlobalGRACE and into Protity is that feminist participatory research can be a genuine catalyst for the creation of lasting positive impacts. That not all of these impacts were wholly anticipated makes them all the more valuable precisely because they were created and extended beyond the research frame, generating their own beautiful dynamic and supportive coalitions between participants to build tangible impacts both for the women involved and beyond into wider Sylheti society. Women have enhanced their confidence and esteem, garnered valuable new skills and in turn supported other women and their families to see their potential for alternative futures, and in so doing they have defied, disrupted and challenged some of the normative patriarchal gender codes and stereotypes that can serve to restrict them. Finally, we would argue that what we have witnessed has been recognisable positive social change for many participant women in their sense of personal wellbeing and capacity to build greater equalities and enhanced futures for themselves in the face of gendered, socio-cultural and economic marginalisation.