There are three directions in the state of the art. First, feminist critique has shown how feminist discourses can be diluted and coopted by the existing neoliberal paradigm in development governance. This important critique reveals the problems of essentializing and instrumentalizing women in development programs. Yet, it risks over-focus on public discourses and situates gender work in a binary fashion, separating those on the inside and the outside of institutions. In one article-in-progress, "Politics of Engagement," the objective is to move the discussion beyond the binary of cooptation inside versus activism outside. The article shows gender experts’ circulations among multiple organizations and maps their strategies around the often-discussed themes of instrumentalization and ambiguity. It reaches beyond the state of the art by delineating the complexity of gender expertise work and posits instrumentalization and ambiguity as both process and outcome, with different rationales and political potentials.
Scholarship also studies gender experts in international governance. Scholars, especially Altan-Olcay’s supervisor Elisabeth Prügl, approach gender expertise in terms of technologies of governance, highlighting power relations and contestations. Scholarship shows that gender experts negotiate with hegemonic ideologies, which can expand political possibilities and close them off. This important literature documents expert engagements with hegemonic discourses of neoliberalism. However, there is little discussion of the growing strength of discourses of cultural difference. A second article entitled “Making and Unmaking Culture” addresses this gap. It maps out gender experts’ encounters with claims of cultural difference and religious dictates. With each encounter studied, it investigates how gender expertise becomes part of stabilizing or destabilizing widely accepted understandings of what religion and cultural difference entail. The article moves beyond the state of the art by addressing this gap in the literature on gender experts and hegemonic ideologies, and by studying how the pull of both cultural relativism and orientalism can be resisted.
Finally, Altan-Olcay is writing a paper on technologies of gender expertise. Technologies of expertise literature focuses on the ways in which expert knowledge performs power by technicalizing issues of governance, which are actually highly politicized. This work of technicalization includes the production of concepts, tools and their dissemination. This article will move beyond the state of the art by studying political contestations before stakeholders accept a concept. It will move discussions further by highlighting the continuous political work needed to keep concepts stable.
During fieldwork, Altan-Olcay has also discovered new aspects of the study, not anticipated previously. One paper that she is currently formulating is on the implications of multiple temporal horizons of development work. A second paper is on interactions between humanitarian relief work and broader development paradigms. Altan-Olcay is also planning a multi-sited project based on the results of this research. Finally, she is transitioning back to her home university; and intends to use her research and the networks she has established for the benefit of the scholarly community at Koç University and beyond.
