This dissertation research project is the study of poor women's labor in India and how it is affected by consumer fair trade movements in the context of rapid corporate globalization. Drawing on anthropology of transnational alternative trade movements, ethnographies of women's work, and studies of subaltern struggles for access to property and better livelihoods, this project explores what socially responsible consumption/corporate social responsibility means for the political futures of women tea plantation workers and women tea farmers in the tea producing district of Darjeeling, India. Through a comparative ethnography of these two groups, this study explores if and how Fair Trade-organic production affects women's household relations and resource sharing, their presence and negotiating power within their labor union and cooperative, and their community relations. Spread over twelve months, the primary research techniques for this project are: participant observation at union/cooperative meetings, households and religious and social gatherings in the proposed communities; interviews and oral histories among a sample of 30 women from each group; surveys; and archival work. The project tests whether actors' strategic engagement with their colonial pasts, particular organizational structures for collective bargaining, and competing gender ideologies of work at the two settings produce different outcomes of Fair Trade polices among women plantation workers and women tea farmers.
