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KAREN ROSENBERG
Women Studies

 As a Ph.D. candidate in Women Studies, Karen Rosenberg is researching "the critical question of the relative effectiveness of models of social justice, focusing her project on the domain of family violence."  Her dissertation will compare responses to family violence in Canada and the United States.

Ms. Rosenberg's personal statement:      

"We are constantly being astonished at the amazing discoveries in the field of violence.  But I maintain that far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries will be made in the field of nonviolence." Mahatma Gandhi

"The adage that peace is far more than the absence of war has animated my life for the past decade.  My work focuses on peace and safety in the home, which I firmly believe is the fundamental building block of a peaceful society.  My work asks: how can a society best respond when there is violence in the home?  What role should the law play in mediating family relationships?  What do responses to family violence reveal about the society that enacts them?  And, how do these answers differ across national contexts?  I approach these questions from both inside and outside of the academy.  I find that this interplay has enabled me to find greater meaning--and have far greater impact--than if I stood in one sphere alone.  Plainly, my work is about creating change.  I do this through teaching, collaborative framing of my research project, and using my work to create new spaces for critical dialogue.

I am particularly interested in creating innovative dialogue across axes of difference--including class, race, gender, nationality and age.  In my work as a domestic violence legal advocate, I developed and ran many trainings for survivors of violence, advocates, attorneys, law enforcement, and others.  In these trainings I searched for ways for participants to think about larger issues of social change.  A nagging sense that I needed more critical tools in order to do my work led me to enter the doctoral program in Women Studies.  I entered the program wanting to bridge the worlds of 'activism' and 'academia,' though I now conceptualize these two categories as thoroughly interrelated and constantly look for spaces to combine the tow.   As a Huckabay Fellow (2002-2003), I explored ways to create dialogue in the classroom, as part of a new introductory transnational feminist theory course.  I take insights from this project into the community work.  In 2005 I represented Dr. Betty Schmitz and the Center for Curriculum Transformation at a pan-American conference on gender and education in Santiago, Chile.  Conference participants seamlessly integrated their roles as academics and activists, and I learned a tremendous amount from them.  As a participant in the Simpson Center's 2004 Connecting with the Community Institute, I learned new tools and strategies for crafting a career as a public scholar.  I was inspired by the faculty speakers who integrated deep social concern with their research agendas, and I was struck by the importance they placed on creating new venues and tools for dialogue.

"I offer three examples that illustrate how I seek to foster critical dialogue for social change in the field of domestic violence, and how I integrate this dialogue into my research.  In 2001, the domestic violence organization I worked with decided to increase their efforts to effect social change.  However, they didn't know how to operationalize this goal.  The Executive Director asked me to research this.  I did a literature review, interviewed national leaders in domestic violence advocacy, and interviewed 29 staff members.  The staff interviews revealed real confusion about the meaning of social change as well as deep race- and class-inflected animosities.  I presented this information to the Executive Director and the staff in both written and workshop form, which helped the organization specify what they meant by social change and develop strategies to attain it.  I then used this data as the basis for my Master's thesis.  I historicized the agency's experiences and applied insights from feminist theory to their situation.  I have shared these insights with the agency as well as with other activist and academic communities.  I am also preparing them for publication.

"In my work with the Washington State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, I helped develop a domestic violence educational tool called 'In Her Shoes.'  Based on the real experiences of women in abusive relationship, the tool asks participants to make life choices based on exceedingly limited options.  'In Her Shoes' is now used in national and international settings because of its effectiveness in conveying the immediacy and complexity of domestic violence.  I shared this tool with colleagues at Programs for Appropriate Technology in Health (PATH), an international public health organization.  PATH then decided to work with its partners in Latin America to create a version based on the experiences of Latin American women.  I had the honor of working on this collaboration and presented the project history and methodology at a conference in Nicaragua in 2005.  I continue to be humbled and awed by the reception 'In Her Shoes' receives.  Last week, for example, a domestic violence advocate at the Fort Lewis military base told me that she uses it with all new recruits.  She described the contradictions in teaching nonviolence within the military (even on a physical level: she trains in rooms with tanks), and said that 'In Her Shoes' has been a 'magic key' that enables her to start dialogue on healthy relationships.

"Since 1996 I have been involved in a statewide domestic violence training for advocates, police officers, and prosecutors.  I was a conference participant, a conference trainer, and the conference coordinator.  I helped write the three day curriculum--a curriculum designed to surface deeply held prejudices and misconceptions that interfere with protecting domestic violence survivors.  Some years, simply keeping people sitting at the same table has been a challenge.  However, during the past two years our training team has seen a shift in attitude: police officers and prosecutors are increasingly willing to hear about survivors' experiences and advocates are more willing to hear how tough it is to uphold imperfect laws.

"My work with this training, including in-depth discussions with legal actors across the state, has shaped my dissertation research.  I have heard an increasingly urgent critique of the law-and-order approach to domestic violence, even from those that work within the legal system.  Criminalization has been criticized for its lack of effectiveness, punitive impacts on some victims, and neglect of the root causes of domestic violence.  My interest in social justice and creating the conditions for peaceful homes leads me to ask, '(how) can the legal system work more effectively?  What alternatives to criminalization are being practiced?  How are they working?'  I have decided to address these questions comparatively, focusing on Canada and the United States.  Canada has been more willing to explore alternative justice models, such as restorative justice and community-based mediation.  My dissertation will compare responses to family violence in Canada and the United States, with an eye toward strengthening intellectual and activist bridges across these sites.

"In my work both within and beyond the academy, I search for what Gandhi so eloquently calls 'the far more undreamt of and seemingly impossible discoveries' in creating homes that are free of violence.  I am honored to be considered for the Graduate [School] Medal for this work."

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