Dr. Kathleen O’Reilly is a professor in the Department of Geography at Texas A&M University and is its presidential impact fellow. She has over 25 years of research experience in gender, and water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) interventions in rural and urban India. She is trained as a feminist geographer, ethnographer, and South Asia scholar. Her qualitative research on gender norms has identified new information regarding the negative influence of these norms on physical, environmental, social, and sexual stressors related to WASH. Over the course of her career, she has sought an in-depth understanding of internal community and household dynamics when it comes to control and access to resources, like time and toilets, for women and the socially marginalized groups. Her research highlights the need to understand the complexities of social relations and sanitation policy as they pertain to spatial patterns of inequality in WASH. Recently, she created and taught short workshops on best practices for research on sensitive topics based on her ethnographic research in India. Her work has been funded by, among others, the National Science Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She has also published in such prestigious journals as Geoforum, Health & Place, International Journal of Qualitative Methods, Environment & Urbanization, Water Security, and World Development.
In rural India, where conditions require women’s intensive, unpaid domestic work, it is urgent to study how it reproduces gender inequality; this will also add to the global knowledge on unpaid labor’s gendered impact. Dr. O’Reilly’s Fulbright-Nehru project is investigating the workloads of unmarried and married rural young women; the latter living in matrilocal or patrilocal households. Despite evidence that access to leisure time contributes to women’s well-being, a large gap remains regarding young women’s leisure activities in rural India. This project is attempting to fill that gap by analyzing the gendered geographies of domestic labor and leisure. It is also making a methodological contribution by recording the work and leisure conditions of populations with low literacy through audio diaries.