Part of the 2024 Spring Colloquium Series
About the Speaker: Dr. Helena Zeweri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at UBC. She was drawn to the field of Anthropology because of its ability to attend to how people navigate relations of power in everyday life. Her work aims to provide a critical ethnographic perspective on the lived experiences of displacement and borders in a time of ongoing imperial violence.
Abstract: Based on my new book Between Care and Criminality: Marriage, Citizenship, and Family in Australian Social Welfare, this talk examines how a policy designed to prevent forced marriage targeting Muslim immigrant communities becomes implemented by social welfare practitioners in Australia. Drawing on fieldwork I conducted in Melbourne and its suburbs, I show how prevention workers’ attempts to integrate qualitative and statistical data about the multi-layered realities of forced marriage sit in tension with the state’s insistence that forced marriage is a hidden problem within Muslim migrant communities and thus threatening to Australian borders and values. By centring the knowledge production processes of prevention work, I submit that, in contrast to dominant conceptions of biopolitical welfare in which statistical and qualitative knowledge is used to govern, forced marriage prevention ultimately renders migrants unknowable as a pretext for their criminalization. By turning to prevention workers’ experiences, I show how cultural sensitivity in Australian social welfare meets its limits when it encounters the criminal justice and immigration systems.
Film Still from ‘Upon My Daughter’, Gazelle Samizay
Date and Time: Thursday, February 15, 2024 12:30pm-2:00pm, followed by a light lunch in the ANSO Lino Lounge
Location: Anthropology & Sociology Building (ANSO) Room 134, 6303 NW Marine Drive
