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- All Subjects: Critical ethnography
- Creators: Goldberg, Brett S.
- Creators: Robert, Jason
- Creators: Swadener, Beth B.
Description
People in college are made vulnerable to sexual, domestic, and relationship violence by narratives of individual “bad apples” that obscure violence as a cultural condition. Scholars in Gender Studies have worked to name and identify the extent of the problem of sexual, domestic, and relationship violence and argue that victims must be centered in campus-based research. Cultural Geographers have investigated violence as socially re/produced through the relationships between culture, community, and space. However, few works have engaged survivors as research partners to investigate survivorhood, relationality, and trauma to understand how to undo rape culture, thus endorsing survivors as passive subjects rather than active agents for social change. My dissertation asserts that home work is the personal and relational labor of practicing community and enacting justice that survivors engage in to come to feel at home in our bodyminds and relationships. My interlocutors are 10 survivors of sexual violence experienced while attending university in Minneapolis and five survivor-advocacy practitioners. To be survivor-centered and uplift survivor-voice, this project partners with my interlocutors as co-researchers and is built upon critical ethnography and Indigenous methodologies. I utilize semi-structured interviews, walking conversations, and group discussions in which I co-performatively witness survivorhood with my interlocutors. Chapter 1 situates sexual violence in the United States, discusses survivor-voice and the project’s method/ologies, and the significances of Minneapolis as the site of study. Chapter 2 explores “why” my interlocutors “do community”: To meet various needs, to support their growth, and to engage in mutual aid. Chapter 3 explores “how” my interlocutors do community: Showing up, vulnerability, and mutual care. In Chapter 4, my interlocutors and I build our theory of justice as a process of doing community rooted in accountability, responsibility, and relationships that allows us to feel at home in our bodyminds, relationships, and encounters. My research shows that active community engagement is the core variable for pursuing justice, shifting views on community building, campus policies, and processes of justice related to sexual violence. Situated in Minneapolis, my research connects rape culture, white supremacy, and state violence to the crisis of sexual violence on campus.
ContributorsGoldberg, Brett S. (Author) / Shabazz, Rashad (Thesis advisor) / Bailey, Marlon M. (Committee member) / Swadener, Beth B. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2022
Description
This dissertation investigates the convergence of the nation-state, biomedicine and (bio)capital around the construction of sickle cell disease as a subaltern disorder in the caste-based society of India. It inquires how sickle cell disease that developed evolutionarily due to environmental factors—and that is also globally racialized as a “Black disease”—has come to be associated with subaltern communities, particularly the indigenous, traditionally non-Hindu Adivasi communities of India. Such a subaltern association characterizes Adivasi biologies as inherently genetically “risky” thereby providing a biopolitical mandate to the Hindu-majoritarian Indian State to carry out biomedical interventions through promissory biocapital in the name of democratic inclusion. I center on the illness narratives of subaltern sickle cell sufferers to highlight how the caste-ization of sickle cell bodies in biomedical and policy discourses, and the attendant biocapital prospecting of subaltern biologies, are nonetheless challenged by communities through their lived experiences. Viewing this association from the Adivasi standpoint—marked by continuous dispossession and displacement—illuminates not only the biopolitical governance of subaltern reproduction by the Indian State. A primary objective of my dissertation project is also to use precarity as an epistemic site for interrogating the scopes and limits of a novel biopower formed by the nexus between the State, national biomedicine and transnational biocapital. This dissertation is therefore an attempt at unearthing the subjugated knowledges of Adivasi communities regarding alternative modes of existing in the world that continuously resist the assimilatory power of race, caste and capital. In ethnographically centering narratives of suffering among doubly (socially/economically) marginalized communities, the project illuminates the contradictions between public health measures that emphasize on sickle cell management through biomedical technologies of reproductive screening and the material conditions of sickle cell sufferers struggling to access basic medical care. This dissertation therefore juxtaposes policy interventions against community articulations of reproductive freedom that posits community health work as the fulcrum for developing reproductively just ecologies. At the same time, in utilizing multi-modal and multi-sited ethnographic methods, the project also contributes towards developing decolonial and digital ethnographic methods that are attentive to the aggravated precarity of marginalized communities in a pandemic prone world.
ContributorsDas, Sanghamitra (Author) / Smith, Lindsay A. (Thesis advisor) / Quan, H.L.T. (Committee member) / Maienschein, Jane (Committee member) / Prasad, Indulata (Committee member) / Robert, Jason (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023