Suruchi Thapar-Bjorkert

• Uppsala University

The important role of gatekeepers in accessing and negotiating the field has been well established. In this research note, we highlight an underexplored dimension of gatekeeping in relation to our fieldwork on the Kalbeliya community of Rajasthan in India. Existing scholarship on the Kalbeliyas has mainly focused on the politics of heritage recogni...

This study explores the complex conditions of cross-border marriages between Syrian refugee women and Jordanian men in Mafraq, Jordan, within the context of South-South migration. Through qualitative interviews in Mughayyir, Raba', and Zaatari, the research examines specific gendered and raced relations shaped by discourses and practices of feminin...

Since the early 2000s, India has been a world leading hub for cross border reproductive treatments, in particular surrogacy, with the nation positioning itself as the “mother destination” for transnational commercial surrogacy, offering “First world services at Third world prices”. State policies, lack of legal regulation, state of the art medical...

This article offers a critical analysis of Manish Jha’s debut feature film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (2003). The movie offers a dystopic vision of a near future when the systematic killing of new born females would leave villages and its surroundings with no women in it at all. Referring to this phenomenon as ‘bachelor villages’, scholars...

In 1999, Sweden introduced legislation that prohibits and criminalises the purchase of sex – while continuing to decriminalise the selling of sex. Referred to as the ‘Swedish model’, or the ‘Nordic model’ after neighbouring countries followed suit, this legal framework is built on an understanding of ‘prostitution’ as exploitation and a form of vio...

Vulnerability is a pivotal concept for understanding transnational commercial surrogacy and the ethics of reproductive travel. While implicitly recognizing vulnerability as important, existing scholarship falls short of understanding the dynamism of vulnerability. Placing our empirical analysis in conjunction with the rich theoretical literature on...

This paper highlights the embeddedness of xenophobia in institutions through a theoretical but empirically under-researched concept of structural violence. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interview data with refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa, we explore the empirical utility of the concept of structural violence in shaping refugee women’s ever...

Aim: The aim is to illustrate and analyse reflections from graduate nursing students over their experience of discussing racism in healthcare in an educational intervention. Design: A qualitative, descriptive design was adopted. Methods: Data were collected through written reflections and analysed through content analysis. In total, 81 student...

While regularly applied to globalized migration, conceptualizations of hospitality have rarely been used to understand healthcare settings. Drawing on interviews with healthcare staff in Sweden, our article contributes to the current conceptualization of hospitality accounting for: the internal contradictions of hospitality that racialized staff ex...

The central aim of this article is to examine intersectional processes of racialisation within the academic communities: racialisation of knowledge producers and their produced knowledge. We explore what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. We use our racialised sc...

Background Racism constitutes a barrier towards achieving equitable healthcare as documented in research showing unequal processes of delivering, accessing, and receiving healthcare across countries and healthcare indicators. This review summarizes studies examining how racism is discussed and produced in the process of delivering, accessing and re...

The article argues that transnational adoption and surrogacy from South Korea and India are shaped through US and British imperial and colonial histories in Korea and India respectively. We focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early British India and kijich’on (camptown) women in post–World War II Korea. The management of nativ...

Encountering racism is burdensome and meeting it in a healthcare setting is no exception. This paper is part of alarger study that focusedonunderstandingandaddressingracismin healthcare in Sweden. In the paper, we draw on interviews with 12 ethnic minority healthcare staff who described how they managed emotional labor in their encounters with raci...

An educational intervention, based on qualitative evidence of racism in healthcare, is described. Using vignettes from a previous project, interviews were conducted to gather qualitative evidence of racism in healthcare settings from a wide range of healthcare staff in Sweden. From this interview material, case studies were devised that were subseq...

This article analyses processes of social change in rural India through an ethnographic analysis of everyday politics in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Its main argument is that even if overt resistance or ‘noisy’ collective action by the poor is rarely seen, a great deal of social change is occurring through a subtle ‘politic...

In this paper, we present a novel, survey-based method to measure people’s empowerment, across different domains of their lives. The method includes three elements: (i) a direct measurement of decision-making, defined as the ability to make choices; (ii) a measure of whether people have reasons to value those choices; and (iii) a measure of the rol...

Att invånarna i Järvaområdet är överrepresenterade bland offren för covid-19- pandemin riktar återigen uppmärksamheten på marginaliserade, eftersatta och rasifierade bostadsområden, men av andra skäl än under upploppen 2013. I samband med pandemin har de marginaliserades röster alltmer dränkts i ett skuldbeläggande som ger ”dem” ansvar för deras eg...

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our histories with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals. James Baldwin (2017, p.107) Coronavirus has highlighted the incongruencies of education as a public good, re-articulating social injustices which further alienate groups lacking in cultural capital....

Research shows how racism can negatively affect access to health care and treatment. However, limited theoretical research exists on conceptualizing racism in health care. In this article, we use structural violence as a theoretical tool to understand how racism as an institutionalized social structure is enacted in subtle ways and how the “violenc...

The central aim of this article is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. Through autoethnography as an alternative methodological entry point, we analy...

Background Despite the removal of the term ’race’ from statutory documents in Sweden, after the Second World War, racism continues to exist in various institutions including healthcare. Racism can persist in the absence of a biological notion of ’race’ but becomes harder to explain when there is no official recognition. There is evidence of discrim...

The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India opens a new chapter in rural governance, signifying transformative potential for enhancing economic and social security. One of the key objectives of the Act is to aid in the empowerment of marginalised communities, especially women, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tri...

This paper describes the difficulties of researching racism in healthcare contexts as part of the wider issue of neoliberal reforms in welfare states in the age of global migration. In trying to understand the contradiction of a phenomenon that is historical and strongly felt by individuals and yet widely denied by both institutions and individuals...

Background Racism is difficult to discuss in the context of Swedish healthcare for various cultural and administrative reasons. Herein, we interpret the fragmentary nature of the evidence of racialising processes and the difficulty of reporting racist discrimination in terms of structural violence. Methods In response to the unspeakable nature of...

a department of Government, uppsala university, uppsala, Sweden; b Institutionen för tema (teMa)/ tema Genus (teMaG), linköpings universitet, linköping, Sweden ABSTRACT Euro-American feminism's embeddedness in a neo-liberal geo-political framework has created new though contested spaces for knowledge production among scholars, practitioners and pol...

This article considers the relationship between transnationalism and social capital amongst young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The central aim of the article is to explore how second generation Pakistani Muslim women accrue faith based social capital to negotiate and resist transnational gendered expectations, norms and pract...

In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'misrecognition', 'condescension' and 'consent and complicity' to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and...

The growing importance of public works programmes (PWPs) as a social protection tool has attracted significant scholarly attention. However, despite the fact that the empowerment of marginalised communities is one of the key objectives of most PWPs, scant attention has been dedicated to this crucial issue. We contextualise these concerns in relatio...

Family migration policies are part of a larger integration policy trend referred to as the ‘civic integrationist turn’. States across Europe have moved away from more rights-based approaches for the integration of immigrants towards a stronger emphasis on obligations, implying that new arrivals must prove to have attained certain integration achiev...

In this article the authors1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In...

Since the early 2000s, the rural landscape of Northern India has been dominated by a parallel system of governance — the khap2 (caste) panchayats.3 These caste panchayats sanction acts of gendered violence and override any notion of equality or gender empowerment, which the Indian constitution endeavoured to provide to women at the grassroots level...

In media and political representations, Muslims have been constructed as ‘ultimate Others’ who pose a threat to western human rights, democracy and freedoms. These representations, however, are gendered. Muslim men and women are positioned in ambiguous and contradictory ways: Muslim men are often represented as embodying a masculinity that is inher...

In this article, we argue that "imagination" is an important tool in the formation of social capital for young Pakistani Muslim men and women in the city of Bradford, UK. The desire for social mobility and the ambition to overcome disadvantage becomes the drivers for change. These aspirations are supported by the transnational habitus, which acts a...

Information and communication technologies (ICTs) afford new possibilities for complex interactions among young people. An Internet user can be both a consumer (receiver) and a producer (sender) of mediated communication, asynchronously or simultaneously—such as someone who both uploads and watches video clips on YouTube (von Feilitzen, 2009). “And...

This article analyses two instances of abortion law reform in Latin America. In 2006, after a decades-long impasse, the highly controversial issue of abortion came to dominate the political agenda when Colombia liberalized its abortion law and Nicaragua adopted a total ban on abortion. The article analyses the central actors in the reform processes...

In this chapter we report on research conducted between 2004 and 2006 in Slough and Bradford which investigated the educational aspirations and experiences of young British Pakistani Muslim men and women.1 Our research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust within a wider programme on migration and citizenship, sought to understand the extent to which you...

In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embody...

Drawing on research with the Pakistani Muslim ‘community’ in inner-city Bradford, West Yorkshire, this paper critically engages with relevant debates on social capital and educational aspirations. It examines the processes and mechanisms in the accumulation of social capital within the family and the immediate community, to demonstrate how three se...

This article draws on narratives of volunteers working with women who have experienced violence. It explores how institutional discourses nurture a culture of blame and responsibility. Using qualitative data, it examines the ways in which women victims are seen as complicit in their own victimization. An indirect consequence of the blame/responsibi...

The aim of this article is to deepen the understanding of male patients' experiences of abuse in health care (AHC). Thirteen patients who had experienced AHC were interviewed using a Grounded Theory methodology. Three categories, "Crises of Confidence," "Ignored" and "Frustration, " intersected to form the core category "Mentally Pinioned." This la...

This paper explores the ever-evolving relationship between gatekeepers and the researcher, and the ways in which it may facilitate, constrain or transform the research process by opening and/or closing the gate. We explore the methodological issue of positionality and discuss the ways in which gatekeepers drew on different axes of the researcher's...

At present, health care staff do not seem to have sufficient knowledge about their patients' abusive experiences. The aim of the present study is to analyze and discuss what the implications might be for the encounter between patients and health care professionals, when experiences of abuse are concealed. The methodology of this article is varied:...

In a study performed with The NorVold Abuse Questionnaire (NorAQ) among Nordic gynecological patients, the prevalence of lifetime abuse in health care (AHC) was 13 - 28%. In the present study we chose a qualitative approach. Our aim was to develop a more in-depth understanding of AHC; as experienced by female Swedish patients. Qualitative interview...

The media, in particular, in U.K. and Sweden has been implicated in disseminating decontexualised discourses, which define, construct and represent the ethnic minority communities (for example, the Turkish-Kurdish, Iraqi-Kurdish or Pakistani Muslims) as 'violent' and locate the issue of honour violence as a 'cultural' problem. A corollary to this u...

In this article we argue that to understand the intransigence and plurality of violence, we need to understand the presence of symbolic violence with other direct forms of violence. We argue that it is important to analyse symbolic violence since its subtle and non-visible ways of working do not allow us to understand its mechanisms completely. Dra...

This article examines the intersections between gender, caste and violence in a post-colonial context. It analyses how in specific cultural and historical contexts, men, women and children can act as both victims and perpetrators of violence and ‘inhuman atrocities’. This is coupled with the lack of law and order and protection from the state, the...

In this article we problematize the dualistic and binary model of researcher/researched interaction in the feminist methodological literature, which suggests that manipulation and exploitation only take place by the researcher. We contest assumptions that research participants occupy only one axis of identity, namely, ‘oppressed victimhood’. Throug...

The aim of this paper is threefold: Firstly, we want to highlight the ‘closed’ nature of violence since gendered violence (a high-incidence and well documented phenomenon) often takes place in the private and personal sphere; a sphere which is not exposed to public scrutiny. We claim this is a circular process partly because the struggle against th...

This paper focuses on certain methodological issues that arose while interviewing Indian women activists in Uttar Pradesh, a state of North India. These activists had actively contributed to the anti-colonial struggle from 1920 till India's independence in 1947. This paper addresses two key issues. Firstly, the category 'Other' was not a fixed cate...

Our paper reviews some existing analyses of social capital with a view to evaluating their usefulness in explaining the educational attainments of young British Pakistanis. Can social capital explain their educational success when compared to their white peers? Conversely can the poor educational attainment of other young British Pakistanis also be...

By critically engaging with relevant debates on social capital, socio-economic mobility and educational aspirations amongst minority ethnic groups, the focus of this paper is to examine the processes and mechanisms in the accumulation of social capital, to demonstrate how, in particular, two sets of interpersonal relationships (between siblings and...

This briefing paper was published by the International Security Programme at Chatham House, in conjunction with the New Security Challenges Programme of the Economic and Social Research Council. Copyright © The Royal Institute of International Affairs. It is available from http://www.chathamhouse.org.uk/files/9803_bp1007islamuk.pdf In 2002 the UK’s...