Sooji Kim has received the Hyde Dissertation Research Award for Graduate Students, for her project, “Discursive Practices on Women’s Empowerment amongst Development Partners in Tanzania.”
My name is Sooji Kim and I am a PhD candidate in Development Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. My research looks into the reasons why there have been increased focus and funding for particular forms of programming for women’s empowerment in international development. I will be utilizing multiple data sources and methods for this study. In particular, I will be using critical discourse analysis to study how discursive structures and practices in development program planning, monitoring of indicators, evaluation frameworks and social media communications build and influence direction towards certain forms of gender programming. I will be focusing on Tanzania as a case study for this research project. I will also be interviewing participants of women’s empowerment programs in Tanzania to understand how local development partners and program participants share in producing, shaping and challenging prevalent discursive practices. My studies have thus far been supported by the UW-Madison Graduate School Fellowship, the Scott Kloeck-Jenson Fellowship and the P.E.O. International Fellowship. I have an MSc in African Studies from the University of Oxford and a BA in English from Seoul National University.