Global affairs professor Julia Kowalski launched her book, Counseling Women: Kinship against Violence in India (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), on February 14, 2023. Discussants were Sarah Lamb of Brandeis University and Michele Friedner of the University of Chicago. Lakshmi Iyer, associate professor of economics and global affairs at the University of Notre Dame, moderated.
Counseling Women follows family counselors in India as they support women who have experienced violence at home in the context of complex shifting legal and familial systems. Drawing on ethnographic research at counseling centers in Jaipur, Rajasthan, Kowalski shows how an individualistic notion of women’s rights places already vulnerable women into even more precarious positions by ignoring the reality of the social relations that shape lives within and beyond the family.
Originally published by at asia.nd.edu on April 02, 2023.