Nia Parson
Assistant Professor
nparson@smu.edu
I examine the
relationships of interpersonal and collective forms of violence, mental and
physical health and how these are gendered. I am interested in understanding
the nature of social suffering produced through violence, as well as women’s
agency in navigating the webs of power that constrain their agency in gendered
ways, with effects on their health situations. I also seek to contribute to our
understandings of how states, processes of globalization, women’s activism, and
non-governmental organizations are involved in shaping women’s health and
avenues for change.
After finishing my
Ph.D. in August 2005, I completed two years of postdoctoral training as a
National Institute of Mental Health Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for
Health, Health Care Policy and Aging Research at Rutgers University. The
Institute provided a rich interdisciplinary environment where I interacted with
health scholars from different backgrounds including medical anthropology,
medical sociology, history of medicine, public health and psychology. During
that time I began building a new line of research examining Spanish-speaking
women immigrants’ mental health and intimate partner violence. I embarked upon
and continue working on a project in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in collaboration
with two major hospitals in the area. Group interviews with diverse
collectivities provide contextual background for individual semi-structured and
life history narrative interviews. I have also engaged in participant
observation activities in a Spanish-speaking support group for women survivors
of intimate partner violence, a local domestic violence coalition, the police
department’s domestic violence response team and the New Jersey Coalition for
Battered Women’s Diversity Task Force.
A new project,
sited in Dallas, will examine the social, political and economic contexts of the
mental health issues of Spanish-speaking immigrant survivors of intimate partner
violence, and their care-seeking in health care arenas. I am also interested in
pursuing research on Peruvian immigrant women survivors of intimate partner
violence in Chile. This kind of comparative project would allow me to
contribute further to our understandings of how globalization and contexts at
various scales affect mental health in gendered ways.
My dissertation,
Gendered Suffering and Social Transformations: Domestic Violence, Dictatorship
and Democracy in Chile, was funded by Wenner-Gren Foundation for
Anthropological Research, Fulbright-Hays, Bevier, and Institute for Research on
Women fellowships. In this manuscript I juxtapose the overt violence of the
dictatorship with more hidden ways the state perpetuates intimate violence in
the post-dictatorship era, characterized by official political democracy. I
highlight how domestic violence is not only social, but also gendered suffering,
and how cultural patterns articulate with political economic regimes to affect
women’s intimate traumatic experiences. I reveal how traumatic experience is
engendered by structures of the neoliberal state and failings of the judicial
system, emphasizing how traumatic experience can be at once devastating and
shocking and everyday, grinding experience. In doing so, I point to the
gendered nature of citizenship. Research concerns, which remain of interest,
included: How do state systems, policies and practices during dictatorship and
transition from dictatorship to democracy affect women’s experiences of domestic
violence?, What does it mean for women to recover from domestic violence in
on-going contexts of inequality?, and How is the trauma associated with women’s
experiences of domestic violence to be conceptualized? I conducted long-term
participant observation activities and semi-structured interviews with staff at
two centers for women who experienced domestic violence: Safe Space, a
non-governmental women’s rights organization and Family Care, the first
state-run center for domestic violence. I participated in and observed weekly
staff meetings, group therapy sessions and public events. At the core of the
research were multiple life history narrative sessions with 18 women who had
experienced domestic violence and sought help at these two centers. Using
Atlas-ti qualitative data analysis software I coded all interview data and field
notes and used this to contextualize women’s experiences within the help-seeking
realms of the domestic violence centers and the political economic contexts
surrounding them more broadly. I have several manuscripts in
process based on my dissertation. I plan to conduct additional, brief
research in Santiago, Chile, including focused follow-up interviews with some of
the women survivors I originally interviewed in 2002-03, along with interviews
with health care and judicial officials, in order to expand the longitudinal
scope of my project.
Curriculum Vitae | Publications
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