Faten Khazaei

I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Sociology. Prior to this, I have completed my PhD at the Laboratory for the Study of Social Processes at the University of Neuchâtel. My dissertation project was funded by the Doc.CH scheme of the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF) and supervised by Prof. Janine Dahinden (MAPS, University of Neuchâtel) and Prof. Marylène Lieber (The Institute of Gender Studies, University of Geneva). My doctoral thesis titled “Manufacturing Difference. Double Standard in Swiss Institutional Responses to Intimate Partner Violence,” looked at the institutional treatment of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Switzerland. It investigated how IPV is identified, named and addressed differently in relation to Swiss citizens and migrants, even though it concerns the same social problem, is treated by the same institutions, and involves people living in the same territory. The focus was on the activity of constructing “migrants” as different and on its institutional conditions of possibility.

An interdisciplinary scholar by training, I work at the intersection of gender studies, critical race studies, but also sociology of migration, institutions and violence. My empirical approach encompasses qualitative research methods, including multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork with participant observation and semi-structured ethnographic and expert interviews. Apart from a guest lectureship in gender studies at the University of Neuchâtel in spring 2020, I was also a researcher at the University Center of Legal Medicine in Latin Switzerland and prepared a research project on the becoming of victims of IPV who consulted Lausanne's Public Hospital during 2011 and 2014.

I am also affiliated to the Institute of Gender Studies at the University of Geneva where I taught a course on the intersections of gender, race/migration and class since February 2019. In 2016/2017 I was a visiting scholar at the Division of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge, also at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University. I have taught courses on qualitative methodology at the Geneva School of Social Work. Prior to joining the University of Neuchâtel, I was a research assistant at the Centre for Gender Studies of the University of Lausanne and at the Centre for the Interdisciplinary Study of Gerontology and Vulnerability of the University of Geneva.  I hold an MA in Gender Studies from the University of Geneva and a Bachelor (Licentiate) in Italian Literature from the University of Tehran.

Domaines de recherche

• Sociologie du genre
• Sociologie de la migration
• Critical race theory
• Ethnographie
• Sociologie des institutions

Thèmes de recherche 

• violence de genre
• violence conjugale et domestique
• intersectionnalité
• Ethnographie des institutions
• construction sociale de la différence et de la culture