Abstract

BURMAN, Erica. Between justice and pathologisation: reflections on epistemic and material violence in transnational migration and domestic violence research. Rev. psicol. polít. [online]. 2017, vol.17, n.40, pp. 500-521. ISSN 1519-549X.

The article addresses ethical-political dilemmas posed by a transnational action research project about and with Pakistani women asylum seekers in the UK, whose asylum status has arisen by virtue of domestic violence, and in the context not only of colonial relationship between Britain and Pakistan but as intensified by the current climate of Islamophobia. The chapter draws upon feminist critiques of liberal multiculturalism which show how this privileges discourses of 'culture' and 'cultural respect' over gender and so reinstates the public-private split that secures women's oppression. The article explores how the practical-political context of generating documentary support to inform better decision-making around asylum claims pressurises accounts towards a 'victim'-focus that limits conceptions of women's agency, alongside the potential for demonisation of the national, cultural and religious contexts that the women are escaping. The chapter offers a rationale and key examples of strategies for returning the problematising gaze from those 'other' arenas to the normalized but equally potent cultural, national and religious context of Britain/the North.

Keywords : gender; culture; representation; asylum; immigration; law.

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