Doctoral Dissertation Research: Vulnerability and Resilience in Contexts of Recurring Violence Against Women

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This project investigates violence against women among marginalized women through an examination of the impacts of a series of recent policy reforms. It asks what legal and other support mechanisms are most likely accessed, utilized, and engaged with when violence against women proves to be systemic and resistant to reform. This mixed-methods study provides an opportunity to assess the everyday ways in which marginalized women experience violence and negotiate its after-effects, which is essential to evaluating the possibilities and limitations of top-down policy models. In addition to supporting the training of graduate and undergraduate student in the methods of empirical, scientific data collection and analysis, findings from this research will be widely disseminated, with practical implications for stakeholders, policymakers, and social scientists, as well as concrete policy recommendations. This research will examine why, despite the implementation of sweeping policy reforms, increasingly high rates of violence against women continue to exist in marginalized communities and will explore what variables contribute to systemic threats of violence. This analytically rich case will permit the researcher to work with a range of local governmental and non-governmental stakeholders, including social service and legal professionals, state level bureaucrats, as well as marginalized survivors and community stakeholders to determine the relationship between policy, community anti-violence initiatives, and legal outcomes among marginalized women. Data will be collected using ethnographic methods, long-term participant observation, semi-structured and life-history interviews, social media analysis, and urban social mapping. The results of the research will contribute new insight into the specific sociocultural, economic, and geopolitical conditions that both undergird and restrict advances towards effective, equitable reforms. In addition, this research will enhance theories of violence, vulnerability, and gendered citizenship, furthering social scientific understandings of how marginalized communities' manifest resilience and organize in contexts of recurring violence.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.