Friederic awarded Campbell Fellowship

Friederic

Karin Friederic, assistant professor of anthropology, has been awarded the Campbell Fellowship for Transformative Research on Women in the Developing World — a 6-month residential fellowship for the 2015-16 year to be carried out at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, N.M.

A cultural anthropologist, Friederic specializes in global health, human rights, development, gender, sexuality and violence.

The fellowship recognizes a female scholar whose research both documents the circumstances of women in the developing world and offers paths to concrete, practical strategies for improving their health, prosperity and general well-being.

With this fellowship, Friederic will synthesize lessons from 13 years of ethnographic research and engaged activism on gender, violence, development and human rights in rural Ecuador. Her research shows 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.

The fellowship will provide an opportunity to analyze the implementation and initial effects of an intervention (funded in 2014 by the Feminist Review Trust) and to identify lessons for similar resource-poor communities with high rates of violence. The result will be a book written for both academic and activist communities.