Events Calendar

Speaker Series - Francis Barchi
Friday, April 26, 2019, 03:00pm - 05:00pm
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Context matters: Place and violence against women in Sub-Saharan Africa

Francis Barchi,

MBE, PhD, Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy,

Rutgers-The State University of New Jersey

For more than three decades, scholars have recognized that violence against women (VAW) occurs within a complex and dynamic web of societal, community, family, and interpersonal factors. Despite this, researchers and social service actors continue to regard VAW primarily as a social phenomenon. Programs designed to reduce VAW remain focused on individuals and their proximal personal relationships, often overlooking strategies that target the environmental and other structural contexts in which violence occurs. In this presentation, Dr. Barchi draws on her research in Botswana and Kenya as well as the work of other scholars in Sub-Saharan Africa to examine the nature of the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘violence’ in the lives of women and adolescent girls.

Francis Barchi is an associate professor in the Edward J. Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy at Rutgers University. In addition, she is a member of the Center for African Studies and the Rutgers Global Health Institute at Rutgers, as well as an affiliated member of the School of Medicine faculty at the Universidad de San Carlos in Guatemala. Prior to joining the faculty at Rutgers, she was a senior fellow in the Center for Medical Ethics at the University of Pennsylvania. 

Dr. Barchi’s work focuses on ethical issues in global health as well as the individual, household, and structural factors that influence women’s and girls’ health in Sub-Saharan Africa. Her research interests in Africa include violence against women and children, the effects of gender norms on women’s lives, and ethical issues relating to international biomedical research. She has two studies underway in Kenya, one exploring the effects of women’s sports on gender norms, and another examining the relationship between women’s sanitation practices in informal settlements and their physical and mental health. A committed educator, Dr. Barchi teaches at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate levels both at Rutgers and internationally, using case-based and active-learning techniques to teach global health and biomedical ethics. She currently is part of a multi-year NIH-funded study in Guatemala to train physicians and researchers in research ethics education and is responsible for a related study to develop and evaluate new courses in responsible science for undergraduate medical students and surgical residents.  Together with faculty and staff at the University of Botswana, Dr. Barchi is developing and evaluating a new review mechanism at the departmental level to improve the quality of undergraduate research at that institution.

3-4:30pm, TILLET 246. Followed by an informal gathering at Pinos in Highland Park

Location 7
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