The article studies the interrelationship between forests, livelihood and gender in Assam. The nature of ownership and control over forests has been changing, leading to significant gender implications. There are different reasons why forests are disappearing. These affect the Karbi tribal women who depend on the forest for their sustenance. The article argues that the core of the environmental rights and gender debate must include the question of who controls and determines access and use of resources. This study explores inequalities in the changing forest landscape experienced by Karbi tribal women and raises their concerns on having less representation and voice in environmental decisions.

Kantha provide a rich material archive to probe women’s engagement with contemporary social, political, economic and religious concerns during the tumultuous decades of the late 19th and early 20th centuries in Bengal. This article gathers a set of stitched vignettes of the 1873 Tarakeshwar affair, involving the seduction and/or rape and murder of a young woman Elokeshi, resulting in sensational court cases. It examines the choices in visualising the events alongside versions in other visual, literary and performative media to ask how their makers may have participated. Did kantha-making offer women space to process this shocking event, as well as many others that went unaddressed in their daily lives? Could these practices foster informal and fleeting sites of support or quiet resistance to dominant narratives? This imagery allows us to ask if pictures in coloured threads served to bear witness to events, experiences and emotions that may have been difficult to verbalise.

Anti-discrimination is a crucial focus for researchers, policymakers and designers of technical systems. Leveraging insights from AI fairness and inclusion studies, we examine algorithmic bias and its tendency to perpetuate discrimination (Selbst et al., 2019, Fairness and abstraction in sociotechnical systems , pp. 59–68) through two case studies: one in a gaming environment and another on a dating platform. Our research on gaming explores the manifestation of toxicity, particularly its impact on gender identities. We examine the normalisation of toxic behaviours within gaming spaces, negatively influencing gendered perceptions and experiences. In the second study, we conduct an experiment on the Bumble dating platform to uncover and address discrimination within the matching algorithms, which influence the profiles shown to users as potential dates. These interactions in user discovery pose significant risks, including sexual violence and other harms, especially for diverse gender communities on dating platforms. By documenting the experiences of non-binary individuals on dating platforms, we contribute to a largely underexplored area of research. This study not only highlights the discrepancies and biases in dating algorithms but also aims to inspire more inclusive design principles that recognise and accommodate the diverse needs of genders and communities.

While women as a category are largely studied as victims of climate change, they are also actors, agents and knowledge-bearers. This is evident in the numerous women-led movements and initiatives on climate change and climate justice, particularly in the global south. However, a preliminary survey of the literature shows that women’s agency in climate change has not been analysed from the phenomenological perspective. Phenomenology as an approach examines human experience from the situated view of the subject as engaged with the world through concepts such as being-in-the-world , pre-conceptual knowledge , transcendence and immanence . Analysing diverse case studies of women-led climate movements and initiatives in the developing south, the article argues that women have shown agency grounded in their pre-conceptual knowledge of nature. Further, the intentionality of human existence and its inseparability from the world of experience condition women to act and mobilise. These movements and initiatives have also proven to be tools of self-realisation for women within the larger patriarchal context. Understanding women’s activism and participation in climate movements through the phenomenological lens has critical policy ramifications too.

The present article analyses feminist foreign policies adopted by Sweden, Canada, France and Mexico to explore how they incorporate the Women and Peace Hypothesis and its application in the present Russia–Ukraine conflict. Of the seven countries that have adopted feminist foreign policies so far, the study selects the above four countries based on their systematic development of the policies once adopted. The study uses qualitative content analysis of both primary and secondary sources. Among primary sources, the study uses foreign-policy documents. It also relies on secondary literature developed around feminist foreign policy and the Women and Peace Hypothesis. The study suggests that Sweden and Canada have strongly incorporated the Women and Peace Hypothesis into their policies. France and Mexico, along with the participation of women in the peace process, give more importance to other aspects of women’s empowerment, such as the promotion of gender equality. In the present scenario, none of these countries stresses on women’s participation in the negotiation to end the ongoing Russia–Ukraine conflict. This study encourages policymakers to involve women in the peace process for an inclusive, peaceful and prosperous world.

Motherhood is a life-changing event. The experience of motherhood among middle-class married Indian women is explored in this qualitative study. The aim of this study was to understand ‘how’ motherhood is incorporated into identity within the context of competing discourses of patriarchy vis-à-vis modernism and feminism. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 urban women, and the data were analysed using thematic analysis. The following themes were identified: roles as contributing to identity, role conflict, social support and growth. From the Eriksonian perspective, motherhood is viewed as a period of psycho-social crises in which the original identity goes through a process of transformation to emerge anew. Implications of an integrated identity for the well-being of mothers are discussed.

Thea Buckley, Mark Thornton Burnett, Sangeeta Datta and Rosa García-Periago (Eds.), Women and Indian Shakespeares. The Arden Shakespeare-Bloomsbury, 2022, 297 pp., ₹11,782 (Hardback). ISBN: 978-1-3502-3432-1.

Seema Chishti, Sumitra and Anees: Tales and Recipes from a Khichdi Family. Harper Collins, 2022, 189 pp., ₹399 (Paperback). ISBN:978-93-5489-588-3.