Interconnected violence: Life and Death at the Urban Margins

In the analysis and writing stage

My dissertation examines the dynamics and politics of violence in marginalized urban neighbourhoods. I draw on 15 months (2021-2023) of field research, 60 interviews, and 12 focus groups with 66 young people from Puerto Nuevo, an asentamiento humano located in Callao, Peru’s second most violent district. I show that studying violence from women’s experiences helps us move away from compartmentalization and cultural essentialism in studying urban and gender violence. Public forms of violence (crime, delinquency, police violence) find a way into the home, affecting family dynamics, mainly how women fulfill their gendered roles.

While public forms of violence find their way into the home, domestic and gender violence, attributed to the private realm, make their way to the street through public displays of violence or community control. These interconnected forms of violence reproduce gender and racial structures. Women’s life experiences and their relations to others show the relationship between the interconnectedness of violence and the care strategies women use to survive collectively.

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Life trajectories and experiences of violence of Indigenous women living in Tkaronto

Currently working on the manuscript with Professor Jerry Flores

Within the work of the National Inquiry on Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, this research examines the life trajectories and experiences of violence of Indigenous women in Tkaronto (Toronto). We show how violence conditions the lives of Indigenous women everywhere they go, from their life at home to their migration experiences and arrival to Toronto. In their life experiences, one can see the interconnections of different forms of violence and how they give meaning to and reinforce each other.

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