A Space of Her Own Making? Women Working for Religiously Inspired Charitable Organisations (RICOs) in their search for meaning in contemporary China

In the past two decades there has been increased scholarship on the role and work of ‘Religiously Inspired Charitable Organisations’ (RICOs) in contemporary China (Laliberte 2003; 2015; Fielder 2012; 2016; 2019; Carino 2015; 2016; 2017; Weller et al. 2017; Chau 2019). RICOs are becoming a ‘more active and vocal sector of society, both in China and abroad (Fielder 2019b). Their growing presence and increasing relevance make them a priority for study. Despite this, there have been few studies that examine women’s motivations, participations and lived experiences in these organisations’, even though they make up the majority of their workforces (Huang 2009; Huang et al. 2011; Carino 2017; Fielder 2019a). By analysing RICOs socially ‘located’ within the PRC, this thesis will make a unique contribution to understanding women’s lives and work in RICOs in China today. This ethnographic study centres on the narratives of thirty women across two RICOs – one Buddhist and one Protestant – living and working in the People’s Republic of China (PRC). Undertaking a comparative study of different RICOs provides an original contribution to scholarship, with others focusing on women’s experiences in one particular organisation (Huang 2003; 2008). This thesis will examine the relational ways in which RICOs create and provide women with ‘vehicles for activism and the dissemination of meaning, identity and cultural codes’ (Yavuz 2003: ix, as cited in Fielder 2019: 77). By conducting a spatial analysis of these organisations that is grounded in the ‘everyday’, it will provide new empirical insights into contemporary forms of female agency and religious subjectivity in China. This thesis will make an original theoretical contribution through its construction of a social capital framework of bonds, binds and bridges. Furthermore, it will analyse how the work of these individual women can be viewed as ‘everyday activism’ and as part of a want for wider social change in Chinese society (Jaschok & Shui 2011; Pink 2012; Palmer 2018; Weller et al. 2017; Fielder 2019a). By centring the narratives of the women who are so often ‘silenced’ in scholarship, this thesis makes an original contribution that unveils their voices, needs, wants and practices. Their stories and experiences are not an ‘add-on’ as is the case in other scholarship on religiously inspired social welfare. As a result, this thesis makes a unique contribution to scholarship on the Chinese location where religion continues to be a relevant force in society, as well as gender social roles being reinterpreted, negotiated and enforced in the wake of great socioeconomic change. In doing so, I will argue that RICOs, and the women who work for them, provide and create ‘opportunity spaces’ where meaning-making practices are developed and discursively embodied. It is through RICOs that alternative views of women’s development can be harnessed and acted upon. Ultimately, I will argue that women are entering, reinterpreting, negotiating and innovating RICOs into spaces of their own making in China today.