This session will share preliminary findings from PhD research in Sri Lanka and UK exploring Tamil and Tamil speaking womxn’s conceptualisations of domestic violence. This includes understandings of coercive control, familial violence, the discussion of how shame can be constructed as an affective politics, so-called ‘honour’ is embedded within gendered domestic violence and politics of “silences” and “resilience”. In both UK and Sri Lanka, Tamil and Tamil speaking womxn’s experiences are often blurred within a minoritised and/or South Asian narrative when the particularities of the community/s’ shape the way that womxn move in the world, navigate domestic violence, seeking support, and how this is interacted with other womxn. The study explores how domestic violence is conceptualised across borders, across generations and how domestic violence is embedded in the everyday and challenging the temporality of the past and present. The arts-based methods including art co-creation, poetry and letter writing are employed to elicit womxn’s ways of meaning making, its exposure to how structural inequalities are experienced and (re)produced in the everyday and exploring how the family is constructed and weaponised as a ‘social institution’ by the state/s to control racialised and sexualised bodies.
About the speaker
Minoya (she/her) is a PhD candidate in Interdisciplinary Policy Studies Research at Kings, College London, exploring the conceptualisations of domestic violence among Tamil and Tamil speaking womxn in UK and Sri Lanka, with arts-based methods. She is also a Community Activist, and a Violence Against Women and Girls Project Officer in local authority.
If you would like to attend this free online event, please follow the link below to book a place.
https://forms.office.com/e/hR543NESr4
This is Seminar 7 of the 2025/26 Centre for Gender and Violence Research Seminar Series. Please see the 2026 Events page for further events in this series.