Suruchi Thapar-Björkert
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 168596 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Suruchi Thapar-Björkert |
| NOMBRES | Suruchi |
| APELLIDO | Thapar-Björkert |
| FIRMA | THAPAR-BJÖRKERT S |
| AFILIACIONES | Uppsala University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1542-8416 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 50 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 266 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 49 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 1 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 1997 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The ‘Violence’ of Development
The demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 marked a decisive turning point, not only in Uttar Pradesh but across India, galvanising Hindu nationalist sentiment and paving the way for the BJP’s national political dominance. It simultaneously legitimised similar legal and political claims at other contested religious sites, most significantly the dispute over the Gyanvapi Mosque in Varanasi. We analyse these trajectories through the framework of ‘V…
Commercial egg extraction and the discourse on empowerment/exploitation in India
In this article, we analyse Indian mass media reportage and ethnographic research findings from participants in commercial egg extraction procedures within assisted reproductive technologies, including egg donation and egg freezing or oocyte cryopreservation. In contrast to egg freezing, egg donation requires compensation to be paid to the donor for her contribution. The commercial egg extraction industry in India is dependent upon women willing …
(Un)Desired Families
The assisted reproductive technology (ART) industry, along with national biopolitical agendas, have contributed to a reconfiguring of the historical entanglements of race and reproduction. In this article, we interrogate this phenomenon by exploring the practice of gestational surrogacy through the lens of racial capitalism. Focusing on surrogates in India and intended parents in Sweden — parties that represent opposite nodes in the “global ferti…
Reconfiguration of Kalbeliya dance in neoliberal economy
This article traces the journey of Gulabo, a renowned Kalbeliya dancer of India, to uncover her pivotal role in shaping the trajectory of Kalbeliya dance towards global recognition as UNESCO-listed Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2010. It examines her lived experiences of marginalization, marked by social stigma, economic deprivation, caste-based discrimination and cultural appropriation. Gulabo’s narrative reveals the dominance of state institut…
The politics of gatekeeping
The important role of gatekeepers in accessing and negotiating the field has been well established. In this research note, we highlight an underexplored dimension of gatekeeping in relation to our fieldwork on the Kalbeliya community of Rajasthan in India. Existing scholarship on the Kalbeliyas has mainly focused on the politics of heritage recognition of Kalbeliya dance of India, which was recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in …
Intimate citizenship and compensatory masculinities
This study explores the complex conditions of cross-border marriages between Syrian refugee women and Jordanian men in Mafraq, Jordan, within the context of South-South migration. Through qualitative interviews in Mughayyir, Raba', and Zaatari, the research examines specific gendered and raced relations shaped by discourses and practices of femininity and masculinity. Racialized gendered dynamics portray the strategic mobilization of non-hegemoni…
Chains of extraction
Since the early 2000s, India has been a world leading hub for cross border reproductive treatments, in particular surrogacy, with the nation positioning itself as the “mother destination” for transnational commercial surrogacy, offering “First world services at Third world prices”. State policies, lack of legal regulation, state of the art medical infrastructure and a steady supply of women ready to take on the role as surrogate mothers against m…
Healthcare staff's racialized talk
Research points to the existence of racial bias and beliefs among healthcare staff but does not explicate accounts of racialization in healthcare and the day-to-day utterances that have racializing effects excluding minoritized users' right to care. This study understands racism as structural and embedded in societies and institutions, including healthcare, as well as in interactions and talk. Through excavating accounts of healthcare staff's tal…
Aiding Aids
The public works program (PWP), the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MNREGA) in India, opened a new chapter in rural governance, signifying transformative potential for enhancing economic and social security. Despite the aim of this social protection scheme to enhance the “livelihood security of the household”, provide employment to landless labourers, and encourage sustainable development, young men still opt to be migrant…
There are two sides to everything”
Vulnerability is a pivotal concept for understanding transnational commercial surrogacy and the ethics of reproductive travel. While implicitly recognizing vulnerability as important, existing scholarship falls short of understanding the dynamism of vulnerability. Placing our empirical analysis in conjunction with the rich theoretical literature on this concept, we explore vulnerability in surrogacy arrangements in India as a “mode of openness,” …
Moderland utan kvinnor
This article offers a critical analysis of Manish Jha’s debut feature film Matrubhoomi: A Nation Without Women (2003). The movie offers a dystopic vision of a near future when the systematic killing of new born females would leave villages and its surroundings with no women in it at all. Referring to this phenomenon as ‘bachelor villages’, scholars have identified this as an emerging social problem with wide far-reaching implications for gender r…
You are Still a Guest in This Country
While regularly applied to globalized migration, conceptualizations of hospitality have rarely been used to understand healthcare settings. Drawing on interviews with healthcare staff in Sweden, our article contributes to the current conceptualization of hospitality accounting for: the internal contradictions of hospitality that racialized staff experience in their everyday interactions with patients and other staff; the shifting boundaries betwe…
Conceptualizing xenophobia as structural violence in the lives of refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa
This paper highlights the embeddedness of xenophobia in institutions through a theoretical but empirically under-researched concept of structural violence. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interview data with refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa, we explore the empirical utility of the concept of structural violence in shaping refugee women's everyday experiences of xenophobia through three analytical themes: (a) unequal access to resources (b) …
Racism in healthcare
Indian “Native Companions” and Korean Camptown Women
The article argues that transnational adoption and surrogacy from South Korea and India are shaped through US and British imperial and colonial histories in Korea and India respectively. We focus on the reproductive labor of “native companions” in early British India and kijich’on (camptown) women in post–World War II Korea. The management of native women’s sexuality was crucial for maintaining social order, political stability, and for consolida…
Just Throw It Behind You and Just Keep Going”
Encountering racism is burdensome and meeting it in a healthcare setting is no exception. This paper is part of a larger study that focused on understanding and addressing racism in healthcare in Sweden. In the paper, we draw on interviews with 12 ethnic minority healthcare staff who described how they managed emotional labor in their encounters with racism at their workplace. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that…
Politics as Negotiation
This article analyses processes of social change in rural India through an ethnographic analysis of everyday politics in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Its main argument is that even if overt resistance or 'noisy' collective action by the poor is rarely seen, a great deal of social change is occurring through a subtle 'politics of negotiation' whereby poor, low-caste agricultural labourers are questioning social norms that u…
Postcolonial and Postsocialist Dialogues
Racism in European Health Care
Research shows how racism can negatively affect access to health care and treatment. However, limited theoretical research exists on conceptualizing racism in health care. In this article, we use structural violence as a theoretical tool to understand how racism as an institutionalized social structure is enacted in subtle ways and how the “violence” built into forms of social organization is rendered invisible through repetition and routinizatio…
Measuring empowerment
Invisibility of Racism in the Global Neoliberal Era
This paper describes the difficulties of researching racism in healthcare contexts as part of the wider issue of neoliberal reforms in welfare states in the age of global migration. In trying to understand the contradiction of a phenomenon that is historical and strongly felt by individuals and yet widely denied by both institutions and individuals, we consider the current political and socioeconomic context of healthcare provision. Despite decad…
Empowerment mechanisms- employment guarantee, women and Dalits in India
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India opens a new chapter in rural governance, signifying transformative potential for enhancing economic and social security. One of the key objectives of the Act is to aid in the empowerment of marginalised communities, especially women, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). However, no analytically rigorous attempt has been made to study the mechanisms and proce…
Do We Need Decolonial Feminism in Sweden
We decided to reflect on this question because in the last several years, a number of scholarly projects and initiatives in different European countries, including Sweden, have applied the term “de
The Postsocialist 'Missing Other' of Transnational Feminism
No abstract available
Epistemic modalities of racialised knowledge production in the Swedish academy
The central aim of this article is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. Through autoethnography as an alternative methodological entry point, we analyse our embodied racialised experiences of navigating through historically white universities within …
Reassessing the research relationship
In this article we problematize the dualistic and binary model of researcher/researched interaction in the feminist methodological literature, which suggests that manipulation and exploitation only take place by the researcher. We contest assumptions that research participants occupy only one axis of identity, namely, 'oppressed victimhood'. Through our position as non-white/non-western and nonwhite/western researchers in a non-western research s…
Methodological dilemmas
This paper explores the ever-evolving relationship between gatekeepers and the researcher, and the ways in which it may facilitate, constrain or transform the research process by opening and/or closing the gate. We explore the methodological issue of positionality and discuss the ways in which gatekeepers drew on different axes of the researcher's identities - religion, ethnicity, gender and age - in ambiguous and contradictory ways. In analysing…
Exploring Symbolic Violence in the Everyday
In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'misrecognition', 'condescension' and 'consent and complicity' to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also si…
Mother India/mother Ireland
Social Capital, Educational Aspirations and Young Pakistani Muslim Men and Women in Bradford, West Yorkshire
Drawing on research with the Pakistani Muslim ‘community’ in inner-city Bradford, West Yorkshire, this paper critically engages with relevant debates on social capital and educational aspirations. It examines the processes and mechanisms in the accumulation of social capital within the family and the immediate community, to demonstrate how three sets of interpersonal relationships (parent-child, child–child and between co-ethnic peers) facilitate…
Do We Need Decolonial Feminism in Sweden
We decided to reflect on this question because in the last several years, a number of scholarly projects and initiatives in different European countries, including Sweden, have applied the term “de
Becoming Non-Swedish
Measuring empowerment
The Postsocialist 'Missing Other' of Transnational Feminism
No abstract available
Epistemic modalities of racialised knowledge production in the Swedish academy
The central aim of this article is to examine the impact of racialization processes within the Swedish academic community in order to understand what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. Through autoethnography as an alternative methodological entry point, we analyse our embodied racialised experiences of navigating through historically white universities within …
Border thinking and disidentification
In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western 'others' to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but …
Abortion Law Reforms in Colombia and Nicaragua
This article analyses two instances of abortion law reform in Latin America. In 2006, after a decades-long impasse, the highly controversial issue of abortion came to dominate the political agenda when Colombia liberalized its abortion law and Nicaragua adopted a total ban on abortion. The article analyses the central actors in the reform processes, their strategies and the opportunity contexts. Drawing on Htun's (2003) framework, it examines why…
Negotiating Otherness
This paper focuses on certain methodological issues that arose while interviewing Indian women activists in Uttar Pradesh, a state of North India. These activists had actively contributed to the anti-colonial struggle from 1920 till India's independence in 1947. This paper addresses two key issues. Firstly, the category 'Other' was not a fixed category. Its meaning was continuously negotiable, both, in my relationship with respondents and in term…
Empowerment mechanisms- employment guarantee, women and Dalits in India
The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA) in India opens a new chapter in rural governance, signifying transformative potential for enhancing economic and social security. One of the key objectives of the Act is to aid in the empowerment of marginalised communities, especially women, Scheduled Castes (SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs). However, no analytically rigorous attempt has been made to study the mechanisms and proce…
Identifying to dis-identify
Euro-American feminism’s embeddedness in a neo-liberal geo-political framework has created new though contested spaces for knowledge production among scholars, practitioners and policy-makers. In particular, a theoretical tool that has lost its transformatory potential is disidentification, specifically as a signifier for forging collective activism within Europe. In the age of global mobility and border-crossings, Western feminist disidentificat…
The domestic sphere as a political site
There are two sides to everything”
Vulnerability is a pivotal concept for understanding transnational commercial surrogacy and the ethics of reproductive travel. While implicitly recognizing vulnerability as important, existing scholarship falls short of understanding the dynamism of vulnerability. Placing our empirical analysis in conjunction with the rich theoretical literature on this concept, we explore vulnerability in surrogacy arrangements in India as a “mode of openness,” …
Conceptualizing xenophobia as structural violence in the lives of refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa
This paper highlights the embeddedness of xenophobia in institutions through a theoretical but empirically under-researched concept of structural violence. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interview data with refugee women in Gauteng, South Africa, we explore the empirical utility of the concept of structural violence in shaping refugee women's everyday experiences of xenophobia through three analytical themes: (a) unequal access to resources (b) …
Healthcare staff's racialized talk
Research points to the existence of racial bias and beliefs among healthcare staff but does not explicate accounts of racialization in healthcare and the day-to-day utterances that have racializing effects excluding minoritized users' right to care. This study understands racism as structural and embedded in societies and institutions, including healthcare, as well as in interactions and talk. Through excavating accounts of healthcare staff's tal…
Just Throw It Behind You and Just Keep Going”
Encountering racism is burdensome and meeting it in a healthcare setting is no exception. This paper is part of a larger study that focused on understanding and addressing racism in healthcare in Sweden. In the paper, we draw on interviews with 12 ethnic minority healthcare staff who described how they managed emotional labor in their encounters with racism at their workplace. Data were analyzed using thematic analysis. The analysis revealed that…
The Imagination and Social Capital
In this article, we argue that 'imagination' is an important tool in the formation of social capital for young Pakistani Muslim men and women in the city of Bradford, UK. The desire for social mobility and the ambition to overcome disadvantage becomes the drivers for change. These aspirations are supported by the transnational habitus, which acts as an important resource and encourages young people to imagine change in their everyday lives and si…
Framing gendered identities
The politics of gatekeeping
The important role of gatekeepers in accessing and negotiating the field has been well established. In this research note, we highlight an underexplored dimension of gatekeeping in relation to our fieldwork on the Kalbeliya community of Rajasthan in India. Existing scholarship on the Kalbeliyas has mainly focused on the politics of heritage recognition of Kalbeliya dance of India, which was recognized as Intangible Cultural Heritage by UNESCO in …
Politics as Negotiation
This article analyses processes of social change in rural India through an ethnographic analysis of everyday politics in two Indian states, Andhra Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. Its main argument is that even if overt resistance or 'noisy' collective action by the poor is rarely seen, a great deal of social change is occurring through a subtle 'politics of negotiation' whereby poor, low-caste agricultural labourers are questioning social norms that u…
Rasifiering av kunskapsproduktion
The central aim of this article is to examine intersectional processes of racialisation within the academic communities: racialisation of knowledge producers and their produced knowledge. We explore what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. We use our racialised scholarly experiences as a methodological entry point to contextualise the navigations and negotiation…
The domestic sphere as a political site
Gender, nationalism and the colonial jail
An important aspect of Indian women's political participation in the nationalist struggle against colonial rule was their imprisonment and confinement within the walls of the prison. To counter the difficulty and monotony of their prison existence, women developed strong solidarity networks which not only helped them to adjust to the temporary upheaval in their lives but also resulted in their becoming strong and determined individuals with a nat…
Negotiating Otherness
This paper focuses on certain methodological issues that arose while interviewing Indian women activists in Uttar Pradesh, a state of North India. These activists had actively contributed to the anti-colonial struggle from 1920 till India's independence in 1947. This paper addresses two key issues. Firstly, the category 'Other' was not a fixed category. Its meaning was continuously negotiable, both, in my relationship with respondents and in term…
Mother India/mother Ireland
Reassessing the research relationship
In this article we problematize the dualistic and binary model of researcher/researched interaction in the feminist methodological literature, which suggests that manipulation and exploitation only take place by the researcher. We contest assumptions that research participants occupy only one axis of identity, namely, 'oppressed victimhood'. Through our position as non-white/non-western and nonwhite/western researchers in a non-western research s…
Women in the Indian National Movement
This text examines the participation of the women of North India in the Indian nationalist movement, portraying how women's lives were significantly affected and reshaped by their involvement in the freedom struggle
Framing gendered identities
Methodological dilemmas
This paper explores the ever-evolving relationship between gatekeepers and the researcher, and the ways in which it may facilitate, constrain or transform the research process by opening and/or closing the gate. We explore the methodological issue of positionality and discuss the ways in which gatekeepers drew on different axes of the researcher's identities - religion, ethnicity, gender and age - in ambiguous and contradictory ways. In analysing…
“But Sometimes I Think . . . They Put Themselves in the Situation”
This article draws on narratives of volunteers working with women who have experienced violence. It explores how institutional discourses nurture a culture of blame and responsibility. Using qualitative data, it examines the ways in which women victims are seen as complicit in their own victimization. An indirect consequence of the blame/responsibility dichotomy is that victims are depicted as deserving their fate. There is, therefore, a culture …
Social Capital, Educational Aspirations and Young Pakistani Muslim Men and Women in Bradford, West Yorkshire
Drawing on research with the Pakistani Muslim ‘community’ in inner-city Bradford, West Yorkshire, this paper critically engages with relevant debates on social capital and educational aspirations. It examines the processes and mechanisms in the accumulation of social capital within the family and the immediate community, to demonstrate how three sets of interpersonal relationships (parent-child, child–child and between co-ethnic peers) facilitate…
Palimpsests of Sexuality and Intimate Violence
In this article, we explore transdisciplinary understandings of scripts as transformative interventions. Script refers, on the one hand, to cognitive, routinized behavioural patterns; on the other hand, it is a multilayered process of enacting, interpreting, and rewriting interaction within a specific context. The metaphor of the palimpsest, embodying and provoking interdisciplinary encounters, links the various layers of practised and narrated s…
Abortion Law Reforms in Colombia and Nicaragua
This article analyses two instances of abortion law reform in Latin America. In 2006, after a decades-long impasse, the highly controversial issue of abortion came to dominate the political agenda when Colombia liberalized its abortion law and Nicaragua adopted a total ban on abortion. The article analyses the central actors in the reform processes, their strategies and the opportunity contexts. Drawing on Htun's (2003) framework, it examines why…
‘Let's Talk About … Men’
In media and political representations, Muslims have been constructed as ‘ultimate Others’ who pose a threat to western human rights, democracy and freedoms. These representations, however, are gendered. Muslim men and women are positioned in ambiguous and contradictory ways: Muslim men are often represented as embodying a masculinity that is inherently misogynistic, controlling and dangerous and, more recently, associated with radicalization and…
Becoming Non-Swedish
The Imagination and Social Capital
In this article, we argue that 'imagination' is an important tool in the formation of social capital for young Pakistani Muslim men and women in the city of Bradford, UK. The desire for social mobility and the ambition to overcome disadvantage becomes the drivers for change. These aspirations are supported by the transnational habitus, which acts as an important resource and encourages young people to imagine change in their everyday lives and si…
Gender, Nations, and Nationalisms
This article summarizes the development of the scholarship on nation and nationalism. It explains the gender blindness of the literature and then presents the relevant contributions of feminists on women and the nation and women’s integration in modern nationhood. The article discusses the interrelatedness of national and gendered identities at the symbolic level and the politicization of the lives of women in both the public and private spheres.…
‘People Constantly Remind Me of My Past … and Make Me Look Like a Monster’
Turning points and the ‘everyday’
In this article the authors 1 approach material and symbolic violence through transdisciplinary readings of theoretical debates, fiction and empirical narratives. They make use of the concept of turning points which disrupt dichotomous and static categorizations of victim and survivor, and their association with passivity and agency respectively. In situations of violence, turning points represent temporality instead of timelessness, dialogism in…
Border thinking and disidentification
In the context of the continuing dominance of delocalised Western feminist theoretical models, which allow the non-Western and not quite Western 'others' to either be epistemically annihilated or appropriated, it becomes crucial to look for transformative feminist theoretical tools which can eventually help break the so-called mere recognition patterns and move in the direction of transversal dialogues, mutual learning practices and volatile but …
Exploring Symbolic Violence in the Everyday
In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'misrecognition', 'condescension' and 'consent and complicity' to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also si…
The paradoxes of empowerment
The growing importance of public works programmes (PWPs) as a social protection tool has attracted significant scholarly attention. However, despite the fact that the empowerment of marginalised communities is one of the key objectives of most PWPs, scant attention has been dedicated to this crucial issue. We contextualise these concerns in relation to India's Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (NREGA). In particular, we propo…
Transnationalism, social capital and gender – young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford, UK
This article considers the relationship between transnationalism and social capital amongst young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The central aim of the article is to explore how second generation Pakistani Muslim women accrue faith based social capital to negotiate and resist transnational gendered expectations, norms and practices. In particular, they use faith-based social capital that is transnationally informed: to challe…
Rasifiering av kunskapsproduktion
The central aim of this article is to examine intersectional processes of racialisation within the academic communities: racialisation of knowledge producers and their produced knowledge. We explore what kinds of knowledge productions and knowing subject positions are rendered (im)possible in everyday academic interactions. We use our racialised scholarly experiences as a methodological entry point to contextualise the navigations and negotiation…
White vulnerability and the politics of reproduction in Top of the Lake
This chapter analyses the racial and emotional dynamics in the acclaimed crime series Top of the Lake: China Girl (Australia, Jane Campion, 2017), set in Sydney where Inspector Robin Griffin (Elisabeth Moss) leads the murder case of an unidentified young Asian woman. Revolving around charged issues such as surrogacy, adoption and migrant sex workers, the series offers a rich and complex reflection on the current debate about the global division o…
Identifying to dis-identify
Euro-American feminism’s embeddedness in a neo-liberal geo-political framework has created new though contested spaces for knowledge production among scholars, practitioners and policy-makers. In particular, a theoretical tool that has lost its transformatory potential is disidentification, specifically as a signifier for forging collective activism within Europe. In the age of global mobility and border-crossings, Western feminist disidentificat…
Sociology (38 obras) · Political science (35 obras) · Gender Studies (31 obras) · Law (27 obras) · Politics (18 obras) · Gender Studies (16 obras) · Psychology (15 obras) · Social science (12 obras) · Law (11 obras) · Gender Politics and Representation (9 obras)