Seminar 4 - Centre for Gender and Violence Research Seminar Series 

This paper emerges from a multi-method qualitative study which explores how two feminist organisations who support GBV and trafficking survivors in Italy and Serbia integrate the concept of intersectionality in their day-to-day work. It specifically focuses on the relationship between staff and migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking survivors and the challenges of respecting principles of survivor-centred care in the face of significant intersectional power imbalances.

The data reveals how awareness of one’s own positionality and power, in part brought about by an increased intersectional sensibility, continues to live alongside idealistic statements of equality amongst all women. Loudly proclaimed beliefs in the autonomy of all women and the need to shift power cohabit with practices that infantilise survivors and punish them for not compliance with feminist ideals. Eurocentric models continue to guide action despite leadership of non-European women and vehement critiques of assimilationist migration policies.

By analysing the quotidian practices of GBV service providers and the principles that inform them, this paper elucidates how feminist organisation deploy the insights of intersectionality in their work, from analysing situations of violence to designing support services and decision-making structures. It also, importantly, speaks to the limits of an intersectional orientation in contexts characterised by structural inequality as well as insufficient resources, rigid institutional policies and increasingly hostile environments against migrants’ and women’s rights.

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Speaker Biography

Ilaria Michelis is a PhD student in Sociology and a Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge, Newnham College. Her research explores how, and to what effect, the concept of intersectionality and its analytical implications are integrated in the practice of feminist organisations that support survivors of violence against women and girls (VAWG). For her doctoral project, Ilaria has been collaborating with two organisations working with migrant, refugee and ‘domestic’ survivors of gender-based violence and human trafficking in Serbia and Italy. Before starting her PhD, Ilaria worked in the field of VAWG prevention and response, women’s rights and gender equality in humanitarian and development settings, primarily in Central and East Africa and the Middle East, for over ten years. As both a practitioner and a researcher, she has a strong interest in the relationship between theory and practice and maximising research impact. Ilaria holds an MPhil in Sociology of Marginality and Exclusion from the University of Cambridge and an MSc in Development Management from the London School of Economics and Political Science

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