Join the Keough School of Global Affairs and its cosponsors for the launch of Professor Julia Kowalski’s new book, Counseling Women: Kinship against Violence in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). Kowalski will discuss her book with Sarah Lamb of Brandeis University and Michele Friedner of the University of Chicago. Lakshmi Iyer, associate professor of economics and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, will moderate.
Counseling Women follows family counselors in India as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family.
Rather than focusing on attaining independence from kin, family counselors in India instead strive to help women cultivate relationships of interdependence in order to reimagine family life in the wake of violence. Counselors mobilize the beliefs, concepts, and frameworks of kinship to offer women interactive strategies to gain agency within the family, including multigenerational kin networks encompassing parents, in-laws, and other extended family. Through this work, kinship becomes a resource through which people imagine and act on new familial futures.
In viewing this reliance on kinship as part of, rather than a deviation from, global women’s rights projects, Counseling Women reassesses Western liberal feminism’s notions of what it means to have agency and what constitutes violence, and retheorizes the role of interdependence in gendered violence and inequality as not only a site of vulnerability but a potential source of strength.
The launch will be followed by a reception in 1050 Jenkins Nanovic Halls. Both the events are free and open to the public.
This event is presented by by the Keough School of Global Affairs, Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies, Kellogg Institute for Global Studies, Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies, Gender Studies Program, and Department of Anthropology
Originally published at asia.nd.edu.