Julia Kowalski

Biography & Research

Julia Kowalski is associate professor of global affairs in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame and a core-affiliated faculty member of the Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

Kowalski is also a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Kellogg Institute for International Studies, Klau Institute for Civil & Human Rights, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies and the Liu Institute. In addition, she is a concurrent faculty member in Notre Dame's Gender Studies Program and Department of Anthropology.

She is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on gender, kinship and expertise, particularly in South Asia. For academic year 2026-27 she is the internal scholar in residence at the Gender Studies Program.

Her work explores how interpretive frameworks impact both how different development experts understand policy issues and how stakeholders work to implement policy goals. Her current research examines efforts among global gender policy advocacy networks to better account for gendered labor via efforts to metricize and measure care work. Spurred by the challenges of accounting for the value of social reproduction in mainstream policy frameworks, and accelerated by crises around care revealed by the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations ranging from the ILO to Oxfam have turned to “care” as a solution to a multitude of social problems linked to gender inequality. Yet “care” is notoriously difficult to measure.

Tentatively titled "Care, Work, Economy: Quantification, Policy, and the Ends of Gender Equality," Kowalski’s next book project draws on an interdisciplinary toolkit from anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and critical policy studies, using archival research, ethnographic observation and analysis, and interviews with policy advocates around the globe. "Care, Work, Economy" examines how different policy experts around the globe seek to develop toolkits and indicators to make “unpaid care work” visible, valued, and equally distributed, tracing their efforts to merge classic understandings of productivity, progress, and public life with alternate understandings of reproduction and value, all at a moment of profound disruption to both transnational gender policy advocacy networks and to global economic systems. An article related to this project is forthcoming in Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. 

"Care, Work, Economy" builds on Kowalski’s first book, "Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India," which investigates the social and communicative processes through which women’s rights projects lead people to reimagine their intimate relations with others, remaking the meanings of both violence and agency. The book was awarded the 2023 Michelle Z. Rosaldo Prize by the Association of Feminist Anthropology and  has won praise for its ethnographic richness and theoretical sophistication. Focusing on counseling services offered by women's rights groups in Rajasthan, "Counseling Women" traces how counselors seek to simultaneously sustain and transform family life in the wake of violence as they help women navigate complex legal and familial systems.

Kowalski's research on the politics of gender, kinship, and interdependence in global women's rights activism has been published in journals including American Anthropologist, American Ethnologist, Feminist Anthropology, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, Violence Against Women, and Social Politics. She continues to research the history of interactive practices such as counseling, sensitivity training, and participatory action projects in India, exploring how experts use community development and social work as tools to cultivate grassroots democracy while also supporting top-down development in post-Independence India, and following the impact of these debates into contemporary efforts to quantify democracy and development.

In both her research and in her teaching and advising, Kowalski explores the differing epistemological traditions behind categories like “gender-based violence” or “care work” in order to critically interrogate unspoken assumptions behind policymaking and development practice. She enjoys working with global affairs students to explore ways to integrate critical-interpretive approaches to social science research with the positivist research approaches valued in global policy spaces.

Kowalski’s research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies. She graduated with a Ph.D. in comparative human development from the University of Chicago.

Recent Work

• "Catalysing Social Work Expertise: Connecting Science and Sarvodaya in Post-Independence India" (South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies)
• "Language beyond labeling: toward a language ideologies analysis of anti-violence interventions" (Violence Against Women)
• "Between gender and kinship: mediating rights and relations in North Indian NGOs" (American Anthropologist)
• "Bureaucratizing sensitivity: documents and expertise in North Indian antiviolence counseling" (Political and Legal Anthropology Review)

Courses

• Gender, Sexuality, and Development (elective for master of global affairs)
• Culture in/and Development (undergraduate elective)

News & Media

• "Notre Dame professor launches book on women’s agency and interdependence in India" (The Observer)
• "Revisiting 'Bureaucratizing Sensitivity': A conversation with Julia Kowalski" (Political and Legal Anthropology Review)
• "New questions, new policy perspectives - Insights from cultural anthropologist Julia Kowalski" (Faculty research video)