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Book review: Kindon, S., Pain, R. and Kesby, M., editors 2007: Participatory action research approaches and methods: connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge. 288 pp. £75 cloth. ISBN: 978 0 415 40550 8

their oppressions, everyday living diffi culties and stigmatization they encounter as FTZ women workers. The ways in which the medical profession, ie, factory nurses, are used to ‘monitor and discourage claims on factory production time’ is an instance which points to the ways in which capitalist industrial production used medical centres to discipline and control unnecessary worker disruptions (p. 116). She points to how their daily worklife hardships limited their participation in broader political activity, and because they were construed by society as ‘loose and immoral women’ and the space within which they sought empowerment was fractured and confl ictual. Consequently when Hewamanne proceeds to trace the lives of seven former FTZ workers in 2003–2004 for a seven-month period followed by a 10-month research period in 2006 to see how these women negotiated their lives in their former villages she fi nds that their working lives did not offer an oppositional consciousness to achieve ‘lasting empowerment’ (p. 237). These women were not totally silenced in their village spaces and indeed would pick appropriate audiences and spaces to raise their cautious and yet socially transformative voices. Yet, because as FTZ workers they had expressed loyalty to dominant cultural discourses, the oppositional consciousness they had gained as there was largely rendered meaningless in village spaces. This is a meticulous and illuminating casestudy book. It goes beyond the usual analysis of one scale, the shop floor, to numerous other scales. As such it is able to point to the complex and uneven ways in which FTZ women worker’s experiences are neither ‘nimble fi ngers’ nor ‘powered to choose’ – ie, they are neither passive victims nor necessarily empowered in sustained ways (Elson and Pearson, 1981; Kabeer, 2000, respectively). Hewamanne shows how the stitching of new identities by FTZ women workers does not involve simply discarding the traditional identities. Instead she underlines how they are about identities which are sutured (à la Stuart Hall) into discursively constructed subject positions where ambivalences over nation, modernity and globalization play out. These raise questions about how we understand the geographies of labour and control. My only quibble with the text was the omission of a historical analysis of Sri Lanka’s labour movement and how this is likely to have borne upon the very issues which Hewamanne underscores. Jayawardena’s (1972) analysis shows how the country’s labour history was enmeshed in the (cultural) politics of gender, (ethno-) nation and modernity, which is likely to have a bearing many decades later upon the construction of FTZ women workers subjectivities, too. Historically situated analysis would of course have implications for geographical debates, too. Paying more attention to the historico-geographical context may have nuanced this already thorough study even further.