Counter-scheduling as tactic: An action research on gendered socialization amid witch-hunt trials in rural West Bengal

This essay reflects on an eight-month action research initiative in an Adivasi village in West Bengal, where an attempt to institutionalize gender parity through a School Management Committee (SMC) revealed how rural transformation is shaped by everyday gendered socialization and the embodied practices through which patriarchal hierarchies endure. The intervention encountered the village not as a community on a linear path to modernization, but as an assemblage of overlapping authorities (bureaucratic, customary, and cosmological) competing for legitimacy. As women cautiously entered decision-making roles in village governance, witch-hunt trials intensified. Not to imply causation, but this temporal coincidence appeared to destabilize the secular practices and reassert older patriarchal orders. Building upon phronetic and feminist participatory action research methodologies, the study demonstrates that emotions like discomfort, guilt, and hesitation were constitutive of change rather than incidental to it. Tactical acts, like counter-scheduling SMC meetings amid witch-hunt rituals created micro-ruptures from which alternative arrangements briefly emerged. The essay argues for the need of engaging with temporal, symbolic, and affective dimensions of power to achieve meaningful change.