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Karin Friederic

2015-2016

Campbell Resident Scholar

Affiliation at time of award:
Assistant Professor
Department of Anthropology
Wake Forest University

The Violence of Human Rights: Intimate Partners, Sexuality, and Development in Rural Ecuador

With this fellowship, Friederic will synthesize lessons from thirteen years of ethnographic research and engaged activism on gender, violence, development, and human rights in rural Ecuador. Her book manuscript, tentatively entitled The Violence of Human Rights: Intimate Partnerships, Gender Violence, and Social Change in Rural Ecuador, argues that gender violence interventions based exclusively on rights-awareness and education are inadequate and sometimes unwittingly insert “liberated” women into much larger dynamics of structural violence. Instead, she argues, interventions should approach violence as embedded in broader concerns about health, community well-being, development, and changing norms of masculinity and femininity. Through summer 2015, she will be engaged in just such an intervention, and this fellowship will allow her to analyze the implementation and initial effects of this work and to identify lessons for similar resource-poor communities with high rates of violence. The result will be a book that speaks across academic and activist communities.