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Vernacular Rights Cultures offers a bold challenge to the dominant epistemologies and political practices of global human rights. It argues that decolonising global human rights calls for a serious epistemic accounting of the historically and politically specific encounters with human rights, and of the forms of world-making that underpin the stakes and struggles for rights and human rights around the globe. Through combining ethnographic investigations with political theory and philosophy, it goes beyond critiquing the Eurocentrism of global human rights, in order to document and examine the different political imaginaries, critical conceptual vocabularies, and gendered political struggles for rights and justice that animate subaltern mobilisations in 'most of the world'. Vernacular Rights Cultures demonstrates that these subaltern struggles call into being different and radical ideas of justice, politics and citizenship, and open up different possibilities and futures for human rights.

Introduction-- S.Madhok, A.Phillips & K.Wilson Choosers or Losers? Feminist Ethical and Political Agency in a Plural and Unequal World-- K.Hutchings The Feminist Subject of Agency: Recognition and Affect in Encounters with 'the Other'-- C.Hemmings & A.Kabesh The Meaning of Agency-- M.Evans The Unbearable Lightness of Theory: Political Ontology and Social Weightlessness in Mouffe's Radical Democracy-- L.McNay Agency as 'Smart Economics': Neoliberalism, Gender and Development-- K.Wilson Action, Agency, Coercion: Reformatting Agency for Oppressive Contexts-- S.Madhok Sexual Exploitation and Abuse in UN Peacekeeping Missions: Problematising Current Responses-- M.Henry Does the Body Make a Difference?-- A.Phillips Rejecting the Choice Paradigm: Rethinking the Ethical Framework in Prostitution and Egg Sale Debates-- H.Widdows Compensating Egg Donors-- E.Jackson Reproblematising Relations of Agency and Coercion: Surrogacy-- S.Ashenden Representing Agency and Coercion: Feminist Readings and Postfeminist Media Fictions-- S.Wearing As if Postfeminism had come True: the Turn to Agency in Cultural Studies of 'Sexualisation'-- R.Gill & N.Donaghue Afterword-- S.Madhok, A.Phillips & K.Wilson

1. Developmentalism, agency and rights : an introduction -- 2. Action, agency, oppression : reformatting agency for oppressive contexts -- 3. Producing subjects and subjectivities for development : the women's development programme, Rajasthan -- 4. Rights and the politics of developing new subjectivities -- 5. Political rights and developmentalism : three self-representations -- 6. Afterword.

This book proposes a new theoretical framework for agency thinking by examining the ethical, discursive and practical engagements of a group of women development workers in north-west India with developmentalism and individual rights. Rethinking Agency asks an underexplored question, tracks the entry, encounter, experience and practice of developmentalism and individual rights, and examines their normative and political trajectory. Through an ethnography of a moral encounter with developmentalism, it raises a critical question: how do we think of agency in oppressive con.

In this paper, I shall make the following propositions: in order to conceptually capture and represent the acts of political protest in a state of exception, we will need to reorient and supplement our representational apparatuses and also our theoretical frameworks for thinking about the gendered modes of protest under emergency laws and political abandonment. Through an analysis of the 'naked protest' of the Meira Peibis in Manipur, a 'state of exception' in democratic India, I shall argue that a series of supplementations to our current thinking on intersectionality, bare life and political subjectivation are required if we are to make sense of political acts of resistance, refusal and disavowal of the law of exception.

This collection aims to think critically about agency and explore the relationship between agency and coercion in greater depth. In academic, activist, and policy circles alike, feminist work has re-focused attention onto women as agents rather than as passive victims of overwhelming structures of male institutional power, or less capable of exercising agency by virtue of their class, race, gender or culture. These broadly positive moves are not without risks. Most notably, they can encourage a triumphalist disregard for constraints through an exclusive emphasis on 'discovering' agency even in the least favourable situations, thereby obscuring domination, inequality, and subordination. So how does bringing agency and coercion into closer interplay impact our understanding of the two? How might the stories of feminist agency change if we locate agency and coercion on the same intellectual frame? What would it mean to disrupt the existing constellation of ideas accompanying agency so as to include coercion, subordination and oppression alongside ideas of freedom, autonomy, and independence? How do we theoretically negotiate agency and coercion in conditions of deep inequality? This collection thinks through these questions in a range of regional, intellectual, ethical and political contexts.