Extract

Empowered Spaces

The Political and Everyday Life

Johanna STENERSEN

Örebro University, Sweden

With the aim to study Nicaraguan women’s civic engagement an ethnographic approach seemed given. But the choice to apply a critical ethnographic approach is more of a commitment – there is a purpose with the study that goes beyond answering the research questions. The aim to critically assess participation and communicative practices is based on a critical analysis and a wish to take the critical argument further.

Ethnography as such is multimodal and offers a range of methods and the possibility to combine these for the best purpose of the study (Höijer, 1990). Empirically, the study draws on ethnographically collected material during field work in Nicaragua, Central America between 2008 and 2010, such as individual and focus group interviews, participant observations from a variety of situations in the informants’ ‘ordinary life’, and audio-visual material from organized events (workshops, radio studio recordings, demonstrations etc.). In this article the quotes mainly derive from focus group interviews and informal conversations with young women during an educational workshop about citizenship and gender that was held by the Nicaraguan NGO Grupo Venancia1 in Matagalpa, Nicaragua in March 2011. My particular interest is to discuss how the informants define, talk and act out their civic engagement, what civic participation and identity means to them and how they actually take part in different actions. There is a strong correlation between methodology and critique, and critical...