EXPLORING THE CHALLENGES OF AMARTYA SEN'S WORK AND IDEAS: AN INTRODUCTION

Nobel Laureate Amartya Sen is renowned for his humanitarian approach to economics. His contribution has also been crucial to the development of several aspects of feminist economics and gender analysis. Many of his writings have addressed gender concerns directly, but even when not explicitly feminist, his work has often engaged with themes that are central to feminist economics and philosophy. Indeed, IAFFE has claimed him as ‘‘a feminist economist.’’ This special issue of Feminist Economics is meant as a tribute to a brilliant economist and a fine man. It is also intended as a contribution to scholarship and future research on gender. It both builds on Sen’s ideas and engages with them critically. It outlines the range and usefulness of his work for gender analysis but does not shy away from exploring some of its silences and implicit assumptions. This challenging project was initiated on a sunny summer’s day in London in June 2000. The three of us met to identify the major topics and concepts in Sen’s work which we would endeavor to cover, such as justice, freedom, social choice, agency, functionings and capabilities, missing women, famines, inequality and poverty measures, the human development approach, and culture and identity. Papers were invited through an open ‘‘Call’’ publicized through academic journals, e-mail lists, and publications with a wide readership in developing countries, such as the Economic and Political Weekly (Bombay, India). We also actively solicited papers from experts working on the relevant themes. For the final set of papers we held a workshop at All Souls College, Oxford, UK, in September 2002. The aim of the workshop was to facilitate wide-ranging and in-depth interactions between Sen and the authors, as well as among the paper writers themselves and others invited. The discussions were interactive, spirited, and challenging. We were privileged to have Amartya Sen join us for the full duration of the workshop, and comment on all the presentations. After the workshop, with a final round of revisions, the papers took the form in which they appear in this special issue. Although at the project’s initiation we had hoped to cover all the major aspects of Sen’s work, we were only partially successful. For a start, Feminist Economics 9(2 – 3), 2003, 3 – 12