Presenter: Dr Ayesha Khurshid, Assistant Professor, Florida State University (FSU), USA 

This ethnographic paper focuses on the processes of education and gender empowerment for women teachers from rural and low-income communities in the Punjab region of Pakistan. The analysis shows how education can produce contested practices of gender equality through providing educated women access to new roles in public spaces while further integrating them in the domestic sphere. It questions the current emphasis on gender parity among international educational policies and projects as the key to empowering women. Instead of approaching gender equality as the ability of educated women to participate in public institutions, this article emphasizes the need to examine how education can reproduce certain gender hierarchies while transforming others in different spheres and domains. In addition, it examines how the women participants of this ethnographic study integrated the global women’s rights narratives with the localized Islamic reformist discourses to produce an educated and empowered subjectivity for themselves.