Imagining Gender Futures in Uganda – IMAGENU

project summary

IMAGENU will provide new perspectives on gender and futures in Uganda by placing marriage and its decline in focus, showing how this fundamental gender relation implicates livelihoods, health, education and people’s future imaginations. It will investigate new forms of gender relations that are replacing formal marriage. IMAGENU will be comparative in four ways: It will examine male and female situations; trace changes by comparing grandparents, parents, and youth; attend to socio-economic differences; and compare northern and eastern Uganda. Despite the recent attention to gender issues, there has been little research on trends in the decline in marriage. The overall purpose of IMAGENU is to enhance research capacity by generating new knowledge about how changing patterns of gender partnerships relate to livelihood, education, and reproductive and mental health issues. This will contribute to development of relevant social gender policies, and create debate in the wider public. The project design is comparative and will draw mainly on qualitative methods, investigating post-conflict northern Uganda and eastern Uganda. IMAGENU will focus on 4 overall questions: 1. How do men and women imagine futures of marriage and child filiation in light of current far reaching changes in patterns of partnership? 2. How are gendered livelihood possibilities affected by changes in partnership and child filiation? 3. How do patterns of gendered reproductive and mental health affect and reflect changing patterns of partnership? 4. How are changing partnership patterns related to education? We will collaborate with the NGOs Promundo and International Research on Women (IRW), and BSU at Gulu University. The backbone of IMAGENU is 4 PhDs and 3 post docs, co-supervised by senior Danish and Ugandan researchers. We will write scholarly articles and book chapters; produce policy briefs; create public debates through radio and video documentaries.