Valli Rajah
Biographic Data
| ID | 3793754 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Valli Rajah |
| GIVEN NAMES | Valli |
| FAMILY NAME | Rajah |
| SIGNATURE | RAJAH V |
| AFFILIATIONS | The Graduate Center, CUNY |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9289-4800 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 76 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 25 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Positionality, Power, Privilege, and Accountability in Feminist Community-Engaged Research
Both/And
Peer Support Work in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence
Peer support models of service provision have become increasingly prevalent in recent decades across multiple health and human services fields. In this scoping review, we examine peer support work within the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) service provision, including an examination of how this approach is conceptualized, the mechanisms underlying it, the impact of professionalism, and the benefits and challenges experienced by IPV pee…
Intimate Partner Violence in El Salvador
Research has examined the relationship between femicides, understood as the killing of any woman, and intimate partner violence (IPV). Additionally, women have been found to seek out formal help when they deem their experiences to be severe, yet many reasons prevent them from doing so; hindering our ability to interrupt the cycle of violence and further victimization. Using the Salvadoran 2017 Violence Against Women National Survey, this study ex…
The Impact of Child Polyvictimization and Cultural Factors on Lifetime Intimate Partner Violence Among Salvadoran Women
This study examined the impact of child abuse on intimate partner violence (IPV) among a representative sample of 3,296 women using the Violence Against Women National Survey data from El Salvador. We found that child physical, sexual, and psychological abuse were independently associated with IPV, and experiencing child polyvictimization, along with having a controlling husband increased the risk of IPV victimization. To prevent child abuse (pol…
Understanding Women’s Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholars widely acknowledge that women oppose male violence and control in intimate relationships. Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge of how resistance features in intimate partner violence (IPV) research across the social sciences. Our scoping review helps fill this gap, analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 and 2017. Our review is guided by the following questions…
Understanding the Body and Embodiment in the Context of Women’s Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholars acknowledge that women oppose male intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge regarding how women’s bodies and embodiment, that is, their physical and emotional practices and the cultural and social systems that influence them, figure in this process. Our scoping review helps fill this gap by analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 an…
Understanding Formal Responses to Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Resistance Processes
Intimate partner violence (IPV) literature addresses the ways in which women oppose violent male partners through acts of “everyday resistance.” There is a limited understanding, however, of the relationship between women’s resistance and their formal help-seeking in the context of IPV. Our scoping review, which includes 74 articles published in English-language journals between 1994 and 2017, attempts to help fill this gap by developing systemat…
Anti-Racism and Intersectionality in Feminist Criminology and Academia
In this introduction to the special issue on Anti-Racism and Intersectionality in Feminist Criminology and Academia, we describe the Virtual Forum of the same name that inspired the special issue. The June 4, 2021 Forum was organized by an ad hoc committee of the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women & Crime's Diversity & Inclusion Committee and featured over 100 presenters. We also outline the contributions to the special issue, wh…
The Personal is Political and so is Discomfort
The phrase “the personal is political” is commonly associated with 1970s feminists, for whom it denoted the relationship between personal experiences and broad systems of inequality. However, considering bell hooks’ argument that feminists have lost the power analysis fundamental to the relationship between the personal and the political, we assess the relevance of the notion the ‘personal is political,’ to our work as feminist criminologists. Bu…
Anti-racism in Criminology
Since the uprisings of 2020 in the aftermath of the police-perpetrated the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, universities – and some departments – have expressed their commitments to anti-racism in public statements. While statements are laudable, what matters most is how anti-racism is actualized in our classrooms, our syllabi, our departmental policies and practices, our research, and the discipline of criminology. In this paper, we o…
Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives
Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicting their wrongful convictions, we find exoneree activists convey accepted critiques of criminal just…
The Place of the Body in Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholarship presents a complex picture of women’s resistance to male violence and control. Despite its attention to nuance, intimate partner violence research should further investigate the role of the body and embodiment, that is, how our bodies shape the ways in which individuals perceive and act in the world. To gain purchase on existing research and to chart directions for future investigation, the authors conducted a scoping review and textu…
The Mis-synchronization of Juvenile Reform
In the United States, juvenile rehabilitation programs have moved towards ‘risk-needs’ models, which not only assess risks of recidivism, but also address young peoples’ needs. While laudable for their responsiveness, we argue ‘risk-needs’ models are based on a series of beliefs concerning time and/or temporality that are inconsistent with the social locations and life experiences of young offenders. Based on observations and interview data colle…
Rendering Invisible Punishments Visible
As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated women in post-realignment California, …
Entrapments of consumerism
Based on fieldwork involving unobtrusive observations and interview data collected from young male prisoners participating in a cognitive-therapy program, this article explores how consumerism interpolates the treatment setting and the cultural views of racially marginalized adolescents. While recent literature intimates that such men will possess idiosyncratic cultural “repertoires” or “worldviews,” we find that many young prisoners are strongly…
Changing narrative accounts
Using fieldwork, interviews, and survey data collected from male adolescent prisoners who completed a cognitive treatment program, this study addresses two questions: how do adolescent prisoners account for past and possible future acts to illegally acquire money? What frames are identifiable across these accounts? We identify three frames in adolescent prisoner narratives: a ‘victim’; ‘rebirth/redemptive’; and ‘critical’ frame. While the first f…
Neoliberal prisons and cognitive treatment
Based on fieldwork conducted in a cognitive-treatment setting for young men in jail, this article argues that contemporary rehabilitation efforts not only manifest theories of disciplinary and risk society, but also embody ideologies of the self and economic relations that are consistent with neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from Marxist theories of penality, we show that correctional officers seek to reconfigure the subjectivity of young incarcera…
Intimacy, Time, and Scarcity
Research on the intimate relationships of drug-involved women has characterized these women either as passive victims of male violence and exploitation or as instrumental actors who maintain intimate relationships merely for the financial benefits they provide. This dichotomous depiction fails to capture the complexity of women's accounts of such intimate relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a group of poor, inner-city, largely Afri…
Harnessing the Power of Advocacy–Research Collaborations
The advocacy-research partnership has been identified as a key method of conducting the feminist and activist research that is important to domestic violence. However, these partnerships are often fraught with challenges that may jeopardize their development, sustainability, and potential impact on policy. Previous commentators have identified key challenges to engaging in advocate-researcher collaborations. This article takes particular care to …
Dual Arrest and Other Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Arrest in New York City
Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug -Involved Women
Intimate relationships marked by partner violence are also characterized by sociological ambivalencethe incompatible and sometimes contradictory normative expectations and privileges granted to each partner in the relationship. This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women in violent relationships examines one mode of response to this sociological ambivalence: edgework-resistance. 'Edgework' describes volitional risk-ta…
Aren’t I a Victim?”
The mandated arrest of domestic violence perpetrators is a policy response to the problem of partner violence. Mandatory arrest can result, however, in unintended and sometimes undesirable arrest outcomes, including dual arrests (when both parties are arrested), retaliatory arrests (when the perpetrator has his or her partner wrongfully arrested), and failures to make an arrest (when one is warranted by law). Using an interactionist perspective, …
Respecting Boundaries
Journal Article Respecting Boundaries: The Symbolic and Material Concerns of Drug-Involved Women Employing Violence against Violent Male Partners Get access Valli Rajah Valli Rajah Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 46, Issue 5, September 2006, Pages 837–858, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azl003 Published: 11 April 2006
Social Support Among Women in Methadone Treatment Who Experience Partner Violence
This study explores types, availability, use, and satisfaction of support among women in methadone treatment who reported partner violence. It also examines the role of the woman's intimate partner in isolating her from her social network. A total of 68 women participated in 1 of 14 two-hour focus groups. The findings suggest that male dominance and control function to isolate and prevent women from accessing support needed to cope with partner v…
Social Support Among Women in Methadone Treatment Who Experience Partner Violence
This study explores types, availability, use, and satisfaction of support among women in methadone treatment who reported partner violence. It also examines the role of the woman's intimate partner in isolating her from her social network. A total of 68 women participated in 1 of 14 two-hour focus groups. The findings suggest that male dominance and control function to isolate and prevent women from accessing support needed to cope with partner v…
Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug -Involved Women
Intimate relationships marked by partner violence are also characterized by sociological ambivalencethe incompatible and sometimes contradictory normative expectations and privileges granted to each partner in the relationship. This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women in violent relationships examines one mode of response to this sociological ambivalence: edgework-resistance. 'Edgework' describes volitional risk-ta…
Neoliberal prisons and cognitive treatment
Based on fieldwork conducted in a cognitive-treatment setting for young men in jail, this article argues that contemporary rehabilitation efforts not only manifest theories of disciplinary and risk society, but also embody ideologies of the self and economic relations that are consistent with neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from Marxist theories of penality, we show that correctional officers seek to reconfigure the subjectivity of young incarcera…
Dual Arrest and Other Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Arrest in New York City
Aren’t I a Victim?”
The mandated arrest of domestic violence perpetrators is a policy response to the problem of partner violence. Mandatory arrest can result, however, in unintended and sometimes undesirable arrest outcomes, including dual arrests (when both parties are arrested), retaliatory arrests (when the perpetrator has his or her partner wrongfully arrested), and failures to make an arrest (when one is warranted by law). Using an interactionist perspective, …
Rendering Invisible Punishments Visible
As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated women in post-realignment California, …
Changing narrative accounts
Using fieldwork, interviews, and survey data collected from male adolescent prisoners who completed a cognitive treatment program, this study addresses two questions: how do adolescent prisoners account for past and possible future acts to illegally acquire money? What frames are identifiable across these accounts? We identify three frames in adolescent prisoner narratives: a ‘victim’; ‘rebirth/redemptive’; and ‘critical’ frame. While the first f…
Harnessing the Power of Advocacy–Research Collaborations
The advocacy-research partnership has been identified as a key method of conducting the feminist and activist research that is important to domestic violence. However, these partnerships are often fraught with challenges that may jeopardize their development, sustainability, and potential impact on policy. Previous commentators have identified key challenges to engaging in advocate-researcher collaborations. This article takes particular care to …
Respecting Boundaries
Journal Article Respecting Boundaries: The Symbolic and Material Concerns of Drug-Involved Women Employing Violence against Violent Male Partners Get access Valli Rajah Valli Rajah Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 46, Issue 5, September 2006, Pages 837–858, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azl003 Published: 11 April 2006
Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives
Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicting their wrongful convictions, we find exoneree activists convey accepted critiques of criminal just…
Social Support Among Women in Methadone Treatment Who Experience Partner Violence
This study explores types, availability, use, and satisfaction of support among women in methadone treatment who reported partner violence. It also examines the role of the woman's intimate partner in isolating her from her social network. A total of 68 women participated in 1 of 14 two-hour focus groups. The findings suggest that male dominance and control function to isolate and prevent women from accessing support needed to cope with partner v…
Aren’t I a Victim?”
The mandated arrest of domestic violence perpetrators is a policy response to the problem of partner violence. Mandatory arrest can result, however, in unintended and sometimes undesirable arrest outcomes, including dual arrests (when both parties are arrested), retaliatory arrests (when the perpetrator has his or her partner wrongfully arrested), and failures to make an arrest (when one is warranted by law). Using an interactionist perspective, …
Respecting Boundaries
Journal Article Respecting Boundaries: The Symbolic and Material Concerns of Drug-Involved Women Employing Violence against Violent Male Partners Get access Valli Rajah Valli Rajah Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Criminology, Volume 46, Issue 5, September 2006, Pages 837–858, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjc/azl003 Published: 11 April 2006
Dual Arrest and Other Unintended Consequences of Mandatory Arrest in New York City
Resistance as Edgework in Violent Intimate Relationships of Drug -Involved Women
Intimate relationships marked by partner violence are also characterized by sociological ambivalencethe incompatible and sometimes contradictory normative expectations and privileges granted to each partner in the relationship. This ethnographic interview study of poor, minority, drug-involved women in violent relationships examines one mode of response to this sociological ambivalence: edgework-resistance. 'Edgework' describes volitional risk-ta…
Harnessing the Power of Advocacy–Research Collaborations
The advocacy-research partnership has been identified as a key method of conducting the feminist and activist research that is important to domestic violence. However, these partnerships are often fraught with challenges that may jeopardize their development, sustainability, and potential impact on policy. Previous commentators have identified key challenges to engaging in advocate-researcher collaborations. This article takes particular care to …
Intimacy, Time, and Scarcity
Research on the intimate relationships of drug-involved women has characterized these women either as passive victims of male violence and exploitation or as instrumental actors who maintain intimate relationships merely for the financial benefits they provide. This dichotomous depiction fails to capture the complexity of women's accounts of such intimate relationships. Drawing on in-depth interviews with a group of poor, inner-city, largely Afri…
Neoliberal prisons and cognitive treatment
Based on fieldwork conducted in a cognitive-treatment setting for young men in jail, this article argues that contemporary rehabilitation efforts not only manifest theories of disciplinary and risk society, but also embody ideologies of the self and economic relations that are consistent with neoliberal capitalism. Drawing from Marxist theories of penality, we show that correctional officers seek to reconfigure the subjectivity of young incarcera…
Rendering Invisible Punishments Visible
As the pendulum swings away from mass incarceration, feminist criminologists must be alert to the ways in which forms of invisible punishment continue to oppress and marginalize crime-processed women. Institutional ethnography is a mode of inquiry that examines work processes and how they are coordinated, often through texts and discourses. Through illustrative examples from a sample of formerly incarcerated women in post-realignment California, …
Entrapments of consumerism
Based on fieldwork involving unobtrusive observations and interview data collected from young male prisoners participating in a cognitive-therapy program, this article explores how consumerism interpolates the treatment setting and the cultural views of racially marginalized adolescents. While recent literature intimates that such men will possess idiosyncratic cultural “repertoires” or “worldviews,” we find that many young prisoners are strongly…
Changing narrative accounts
Using fieldwork, interviews, and survey data collected from male adolescent prisoners who completed a cognitive treatment program, this study addresses two questions: how do adolescent prisoners account for past and possible future acts to illegally acquire money? What frames are identifiable across these accounts? We identify three frames in adolescent prisoner narratives: a ‘victim’; ‘rebirth/redemptive’; and ‘critical’ frame. While the first f…
The Mis-synchronization of Juvenile Reform
In the United States, juvenile rehabilitation programs have moved towards ‘risk-needs’ models, which not only assess risks of recidivism, but also address young peoples’ needs. While laudable for their responsiveness, we argue ‘risk-needs’ models are based on a series of beliefs concerning time and/or temporality that are inconsistent with the social locations and life experiences of young offenders. Based on observations and interview data colle…
The Place of the Body in Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholarship presents a complex picture of women’s resistance to male violence and control. Despite its attention to nuance, intimate partner violence research should further investigate the role of the body and embodiment, that is, how our bodies shape the ways in which individuals perceive and act in the world. To gain purchase on existing research and to chart directions for future investigation, the authors conducted a scoping review and textu…
Enhancing the tellability of death-row exoneree narratives
Individuals make sense of experience through telling stories they hope others will hear. To establish an interpretive connection with their audience, narrators must tell stories that are tellable, conceptualized as engaging but not too socially or emotionally challenging. We analyze the narratives of death-sentenced exoneree activists. When depicting their wrongful convictions, we find exoneree activists convey accepted critiques of criminal just…
Understanding Women’s Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholars widely acknowledge that women oppose male violence and control in intimate relationships. Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge of how resistance features in intimate partner violence (IPV) research across the social sciences. Our scoping review helps fill this gap, analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 and 2017. Our review is guided by the following questions…
Understanding the Body and Embodiment in the Context of Women’s Resistance to Intimate Partner Violence
Scholars acknowledge that women oppose male intimate partner violence (IPV). Yet there is limited comprehensive knowledge regarding how women’s bodies and embodiment, that is, their physical and emotional practices and the cultural and social systems that influence them, figure in this process. Our scoping review helps fill this gap by analyzing and synthesizing 74 research articles published in English-language scholarly journals between 1994 an…
Understanding Formal Responses to Intimate Partner Violence and Women’s Resistance Processes
Intimate partner violence (IPV) literature addresses the ways in which women oppose violent male partners through acts of “everyday resistance.” There is a limited understanding, however, of the relationship between women’s resistance and their formal help-seeking in the context of IPV. Our scoping review, which includes 74 articles published in English-language journals between 1994 and 2017, attempts to help fill this gap by developing systemat…
Anti-Racism and Intersectionality in Feminist Criminology and Academia
In this introduction to the special issue on Anti-Racism and Intersectionality in Feminist Criminology and Academia, we describe the Virtual Forum of the same name that inspired the special issue. The June 4, 2021 Forum was organized by an ad hoc committee of the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women & Crime's Diversity & Inclusion Committee and featured over 100 presenters. We also outline the contributions to the special issue, wh…
The Personal is Political and so is Discomfort
The phrase “the personal is political” is commonly associated with 1970s feminists, for whom it denoted the relationship between personal experiences and broad systems of inequality. However, considering bell hooks’ argument that feminists have lost the power analysis fundamental to the relationship between the personal and the political, we assess the relevance of the notion the ‘personal is political,’ to our work as feminist criminologists. Bu…
Anti-racism in Criminology
Since the uprisings of 2020 in the aftermath of the police-perpetrated the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, universities – and some departments – have expressed their commitments to anti-racism in public statements. While statements are laudable, what matters most is how anti-racism is actualized in our classrooms, our syllabi, our departmental policies and practices, our research, and the discipline of criminology. In this paper, we o…
The Impact of Child Polyvictimization and Cultural Factors on Lifetime Intimate Partner Violence Among Salvadoran Women
This study examined the impact of child abuse on intimate partner violence (IPV) among a representative sample of 3,296 women using the Violence Against Women National Survey data from El Salvador. We found that child physical, sexual, and psychological abuse were independently associated with IPV, and experiencing child polyvictimization, along with having a controlling husband increased the risk of IPV victimization. To prevent child abuse (pol…
Peer Support Work in the Context of Intimate Partner Violence
Peer support models of service provision have become increasingly prevalent in recent decades across multiple health and human services fields. In this scoping review, we examine peer support work within the context of intimate partner violence (IPV) service provision, including an examination of how this approach is conceptualized, the mechanisms underlying it, the impact of professionalism, and the benefits and challenges experienced by IPV pee…
Intimate Partner Violence in El Salvador
Research has examined the relationship between femicides, understood as the killing of any woman, and intimate partner violence (IPV). Additionally, women have been found to seek out formal help when they deem their experiences to be severe, yet many reasons prevent them from doing so; hindering our ability to interrupt the cycle of violence and further victimization. Using the Salvadoran 2017 Violence Against Women National Survey, this study ex…
Positionality, Power, Privilege, and Accountability in Feminist Community-Engaged Research
Both/And
Psychology (16 works) · Criminology (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Poison control (13 works) · Sociology (13 works) · Intimate Partner and Family Violence (12 works) · Medicine (12 works) · Domestic violence (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works)