On leave for 2022-23 academic year

Expertise

Gender; kinship; women’s rights; personhood; gendered violence; everyday institutional practices; north India

At the Keough School

Julia Kowalski is assistant professor of global affairs and a concurrent faculty member in Notre Dame’s Gender Studies Program. She also is a faculty fellow of the Keough School’s Liu Institute for Asia and Asian Studies.

Courses

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

Research and Publications

A cultural anthropologist by training, she completed her PhD in the Department of Comparative Human Development at the University of Chicago. She has been conducting fieldwork in North India since 2007, focusing on issues of gender, kinship, women’s rights, personhood, gendered violence, and everyday institutional practices.

Kowalski’s research draws upon methods and theories from cultural, medical, and linguistic anthropology to understand how people work for social change. Her book Counseling Women: Kinship Against Violence in India is an ethnographic study of family counselors employed at women’s rights nongovernmental organizations and is based on fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2017.

Although transnational women’s rights discourse frames kinship as a static structure that harms women, counselors relied on kinship as a flexible set of arguments about how to live well in a world of interdependent relations with others. By analyzing counselors’ interactions with clients, Counseling Women argues that rights-based claims are not always rooted in liberal models of independent personhood. Instead, counselors demonstrate the power of claims about interdependent relations for authorizing women’s access to rights, equality, and autonomy.

Kowalski’s research has been funded by Fulbright-Hays, the Woodrow Wilson Foundation, and the American Institute for Indian Studies. Her work has been published in American Ethnologist, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, and Social Politics. She writes and edits features online for Somatosphere and Anthropology News. Her future work will consider how counseling and other pedagogical practices address sexuality and intimacy among youth in contemporary India, as well as further exploring the history of practices like counseling and mediation in South Asia.

Recent Work

• 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)

In the 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)

News and Blog Posts

• “Rethinking independence, adulthood, and dignity amid a pandemic” (Dignity & Development)