Prize
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Short summary of the thesis: Her PhD thesis analyzes how institutional approaches to intimate partner violence (IPV) are gendered and racialized in the Swiss immigration context. Through a detailed ethnographic study of a police station, a shelter, and a hospital unit in a French-speaking Swiss canton, the thesis shows how professionals psychologize and individualize white, Swiss victims and perpetrators and ignore the gendered power dynamics underlying IPV. In contrast, when the victims are constructed as non-Western “immigrants”, gender analysis returns through the idea that non-Western familial relations are shaped by highly unequal, culturally embedded gender practices. Doing so, the structural dimension of IPV and a feminist reading of it is introduced in a very distorted way by postulating a violent migrant culture as opposed to a seemingly no-violent Swiss society. This double standard through a visibilization of gendered power relations in specific cases, and their silencing in others, leads to perceptions of ethno-racialized differences that are subsequently equated with moral differences between “us” and “them”. Her doctoral work further illuminates how these gendered racialized dynamics that are uncovered through the ethnographic investigation ultimately fail all victims of IPV in that the structural contexts of violence are ignored either through psychological individualization or through homogenizing racialization.