Faten Khazaei
Staff details

I am an interdisciplinary scholar by training, and I work at the intersection of gender studies, critical race studies, but also sociology of migration, institutions and violence. I am interested in racialisation of social problems and my empirical approach encompasses qualitative research methods, including multi-sited ethnography and expert interviews.
My current postdoctoral research project is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation and is titled “Situated Norms: Home visits and the (re)production of social difference through child protection”. It is an ethnographic study of children’s welfare agents in various London borough councils to investigate how the child-protection mission reproduce/enforce social, gendered and ethno-racial order in the name of the best interests of children.
Research interests
Prior to joining Goldsmiths, I have been working as a guest lecturer at the University of Neuchatel where I completed my PhD in 2019. In my doctoral research titled “Manufacturing Difference: Double Standard in Swiss Institutional Responses to Intimate Partner Violence,” I looked at the institutional treatment of intimate partner violence (IPV) in Switzerland. I investigated how IPV is identified, named and addressed differently in relation to Swiss citizens and migrants, by police, social workers and health care professionals, even though it concerns a similar social problem, is treated by the same institutions, and involves people living in the same territory.
I have also been a guest lecturer at the University of Geneva and the Geneva School of Social Work. I have taught courses on the intersections of gender, race/migration and class as well as on qualitative research methodologies. I was also a visiting scholar at the Division of Social Anthropology, at the University of Cambridge, and at the Institute for Research on Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Columbia University in 2016-2017. I hold an MA in Gender Studies from the University of Geneva and a BA in Italian Literature from the University of Tehran.
My research interests include:
• Racialisation of social problems
• Postcolonial, subaltern and decolonial theory and politics
• Feminist theory and politics
• Intersectionality and politics of difference
• Critical race studies
• Ethnography of public institutions
Further profile content
Featured publications
2021:
The truth told by the body: Swiss medicolegal responses to intimate partner violence from a gender perspective
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, Dutch Journal of Gender Studies
2020:
Ethnography of Police 'Domestic Abuse' Interventions: Ethico-methodological reflections
Book chapter in F. Samanani and J. Lenhard (eds), Home: Ethnographic Encounters. London: Bloomsbury Publishing
2019:
Les violences conjugales à la marge : le cas des femmes migrantes en Suisse
Article in Cahiers du genre
2018:
Grounds for Dialogue: Intersectionality and Superdiversity
Article in Dutch Journal for Gender Studies
2014:
Women’s Rights in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights
Non peer-reviewed article in Alizés
Grants and awards
2021:
THE BRIGITTE-SCHNEGG PRIZE 2021
Swiss Association of Gender Studies SAGS for the best PhD