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Anu Sabhlok, part of the Penn State
community for seven years, received
her master's degree in Architecture
at Penn State and is currently
a Ph.D. student in the Department
of Geography.
April 1, 2005
Snugly set in a row of homes in the center of the nation's capitol squats an unassuming, brightly-adorned two-story home. Under its roof you'll find possibly the most eclectic and diverse group of women ever assembled.
An archaeologist, former director of the Explorers Club and South American volcano researcher; a social anthropologist who studied forced migrations of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. and the Gwembe Tonga of Zambia; a journalist for Time, Life, and Fortune magazines; a professional photographer for the United States Navy; a botanist whose work has spanned the entire western hemisphere; paleontologists; biologists; conservationists; speleologists; psychotherapists; Arctic dogsled mushers; teachers; librarians; land-use planners; where does it end? What does this marvelously motley group of women share in common? The answer - a passion for geography.
Anu Sabhlok, a dual-degree Ph.D. student in the Penn State Department of Geography and Women's Studies gave a presentation on her doctoral research to a sample of these women, members of the Society of Women Geographers (SWG), at their headquarters in Washington, D.C. this February. Anu was recently awarded a fellowship by the SWG's National Fellowship Program to help fund her doctoral research.
The Society of Women Geographers was started in 1925 by four widely-known explorers as an opportunity to "bring together women who shared ambitions and interests in unusual world exploration and achievements." Denied membership in most professional organizations of the day, the SWG united women from seemingly disparate disciplines under the broad umbrella of geography.
The Department of Geography nominated Anu for this year's award and arranged transportation for her and three of her fellow graduate students: Jen Fluri (a previous SWG fellow), Gina Bloodworth, and Kari Jensen, to travel to the capitol for the presentation; presenting your research at the Society's headquarters is a requirement of the fellowship program.
"It was a good chance to talk to such diverse women geographers," Anu says. "I got some really interesting questions and I felt like they were genuinely interested in what I was saying."
The Society's headquarters in Washington houses both a library and museum. The library contains over 1200 volumes on geographic scholarship and exploration while the museum exhibits images and artifacts collected by the Society's numerous well-traveled members.
Anu Awarded Summer Residency
Anu Sabhlok has been recently awarded an
IAHS Graduate Student Summer Residency
in praise of her dissertation titled,
(Re)imagining the nation: Women's Organizations
in Gujarat. The award, presented through
the Institute for the Arts and Humanistic Studies,
is a highly competitive, prestigious award
offering a summer grant of three thousand
dollars and an office in Ihlseng Cottage
on the University Park campus from
May 16th - August 12th. The fellowship frees
Anu from teaching for the summer session
while enabling her to continue work
on her dissertation.
Supporting Women in Geography
Next fall, the Department of Geography's
Supporting Women in Geography (SWIG)
organization is planning to invite
representatives of the Society of Women
Geographers to speak with their members
in the hopes of strengthening the
already close bond the two organizations share.
Anu is an active member and treasurer in SWIG.
"The people we spoke with were very aware and distinguished," Anu recalls. "Some of them had traveled to India, to my research site, and they knew a lot about the context. One of the women was actually the first woman to have spent a whole winter in Antarctica; another had been an ambassador in Eastern Europe through the times of conflict and redefinition of borders there."
Anu's presentation at the SWG's headquarters focused on her research in the Indian state of Gujarat - an endeavor that Anu has dedicated over four years to.
Gujarat is Mahatma Gandhi's home state, a place where ideas of non-violent protest and struggle took root before they spread to the rest of India. Ironically, Gujarat today is one of the most violent states in India. In 2002, a series of ethnic and nationalistic riots led to over a thousand deaths and to the displacement of over fifty thousand people. In the years preceding the riots a massive earthquake (2001), two years of extreme drought (2000, 2001), and a cyclone (1999) had already forced thousands into relief camps, where caste and religious tensions run high.
Having already completed her Master's degree in architecture at Penn State and nearly a year into her doctorate work, Anu arrived in Gujarat in 2002 to conduct preliminary fieldwork in earthquake rehabilitation sites; she had been there for two months when she decided to leave for the Punjab, her home state, just days before the riots broke out.
"The riots took place literally within a couple days of my leaving Gujarat. At that point, I was spending most of my time with a trade union of informal sector workers in Ahmedabad, Gujarat and visiting areas that still had rubble on the streets from the earthquake, almost a year back," Anu says.
Working largely as an ethnographer, a role new to her, Anu spent long hours with her research subjects compiling detailed observations and cataloguing hours of interviews.
"How to be an ethnographer and a feminist at the same time is something that I have learned from my advisor Melissa Wright; it is challenging and I really enjoy it," Anu says.
Anu presents her research
at the Society of Women Geographers
Headquarters in Washington, DC.
Photo by Naser Khan
During her semester long stay in Gujarat in 2004, Anu chose to contrast two markedly different women's organizations; their opposing world views prompted Anu to examine how their relief work and ideas of gender and nationalism were influenced by ideology. Both organizations engage in disaster relief; both organizations describe their work as "selfless service."
"I delve into what it means to describe a very public role, sometimes a political role, as 'selfless service'; some women say they would perform this 'selfless service' at home regardless - taking care of their own and maintaining a household," Anu notes.
The Hindi word sewa might be translated as "service," but has deeper-reaching connotations in Indian family life. While sons are expected to contribute primarily toward their parents' financial needs, daughters and daughters-in-law are required to perform most all domestic tasks in the household. The expectations for how sons, daughters, and daughters-in-law carry out sewa often reinforce constraining gender roles in Indian society. Anu drew heavily upon her own childhood experiences and socialized understanding of sewa in her research.
Sewa refers not only to service, but explicitly indicates the space in which that service is performed. Usually sewa refers to service "from the inside"; one performs sewa for one's own family. The women's relief organizations that Anu compared expand the notion of "family" to embrace the entire Indian nation. This broader view allows a much more liberating approach to how sewa is performed.
"There are a lot of women who might not be allowed to work for money outside the home," Anu says. "By calling their work 'selfless service,' the women in these two relief organizations are making a statement: 'We are not doing this for money; we are doing this because it is womanly to serve.'"
Following the devastating earthquake in January of 2001 that ripped through Gujarat killing around 20,000 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless, these women's relief organizations naturally expanded their work to encompass the sudden and enormous disaster relief efforts.
In the wake of this disaster Anu observed how these ideologically opposed organizations marshaled not only their aid work, but also their vision for rebuilding the Indian nation.
"I started getting interested in how these women were articulating their own visions," Anu says, "how that vision was playing a role in their relief work, and how it related to selflessness and nation-building.
Most of the time, women are seen as people who have been given a place, but not necessarily claimed that place within the national imagination. But here were these two organizations that both had very specific views about what the nation should look like."
Though professionally trained in planning and architecture, Anu has always been interested in the human side of development - resettlement and rehabilitation.
For her undergraduate thesis at the Delhi School of Planning and Architecture, Anu worked on a collaborative project with her friend, Indrani Baruah, to study the cultural and economic effects of resettling an entire town and over one hundred villages - the result of a dam constructed in the Himalayas of northern India. The earthquake disaster of 2001 only further fueled her interests to study the complex social processes that accompanied the rehabilitation of Indian villages.
Anu is currently transcribing interviews and analyzing the data from her field work.
"I've started writing my dissertation, but I still have a long way to go," Anu says. "I have a lot of collected data, and I don't think I can process all of it in one dissertation, so I think I'll still have some more years of work left even after I finish my Ph.D."
She may go back to India to continue her research on women's relief organizations, but will also apply for jobs in academia in both the United States and India.
"I love to teach and I love to do research; academia offers me both," Anu remarks. "I'd like to continue my research, but it's very difficult to find a job in India, especially with my disparate degrees; I don't fit into any particular, traditional branch of academia. Here [the U.S.], there are many interdisciplinary programs that I would be interested in working for."
Regardless of how the job hunt turns out, Anu and her partner Jitesh, a graduate student in Landscape Architecture, are expecting some good news this April - the arrival of a brand new family member!