The GendV Project aimed to explore the many urban transformations and changing gender relations in New Delhi, India and Johannesburg, South Africa. The project started in January 2020 and was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council. It was based in the Department of Sociology at the University of Cambridge and was led by Principle Investigator Dr Manali Desai along with a team of Co-Investigators and Researchers.
Recent movements against sexual violence such as #MeToo and mass mobilizations in many countries of the global South such as India, South Africa, Brazil and Peru have brought global attention to violence against women. It was an opportune time to put forward a bold and innovative research agenda that addressed why, despite decades of legislation and policy efforts, violence against women remains so high. The vision of this project was to develop a blueprint for a new generation of scholarship on gendered violence, specifically in this case public and private sexual violence. We identified a clear need to understand this normalization by moving towards what researchers have called a ‘second wave’ of violence research that is theoretically oriented, historically sensitive, contextual, and aimed at granular analyses of violence that can inform more successful and targeted violence-reduction strategies. We did this through a historically informed, contextualized and long-term qualitative study that was simultaneously comparative across nation-states. While large survey data and epidemiological approaches offer much insight into trends and patterns of violence, our approach offered crucial qualitative toolkits for future researchers. Building upon a growing body of ethnographic work on gendered violence, we called for a second-wave of research that places violence within wider transformations in the political-economy of urban life and livelihoods, the attendant shifts in family forms and gender relations, and the historical legacies of racial, ethnic and other forms of categorization that in turn implicate men and women in specific relations to the state and economy.
Principal Investigator: Dr Manali Desai
Research Theme: Politics and Inequality
Funding: ESRC Large Grant
Start Date: Wed, 15/01/2020
End Date: Sat, 15/04/2023