Surviving Violence: Everyday resilience and gender justice in rural-urban India
This British Academy-funded project addresses the gap between law, policy, and access to both support services and justice for domestic abuse victims. It seeks to critically examine how victims access legal and non-legal services across a continuum of rural-urban sites, enhancing empirical knowledge and informing evidence-based policy. In doing so, it adopts a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on expertise from Law, Political Science, Geography, and Anthropology, and employs participatory feminist methodology that emphasises women’s experiences and narratives of domestic violence, as well as their articulations of rights and justice. Consequently, it contributes to developing ever more nuanced understandings of domestic violence—crucial for enhancing formal-informal support and legal provisions for victim-survivors in order to achieve more gender just, and peaceful societies within India. Through this, the project is thus also expected to advance conceptual knowledge regarding domestic violence while developing feminist-legal methodology. The project is also highly collaborative, drawing on existing civil society-academic partnerships across 3 key states: West Bengal, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu.
UK Partners: Queen Mary University of London, University of Oxford
Indian Partners: Nari Samata Manch, Institute of Development Studies Kolkata, Indian Institute of Technology Bombay, Chaitanya
Uncaptioned photographs - Banner Image: Vidya Kulkarni; Secondary Banner Image: Debalina; Listing Image: Vidya Kulkarni. See main project site for the full collection.
