Jakobsen, Hilde, PhD student

By Katherine Harrison on 11 May | 0 comments

GEXcel project: Discussions on wife-beating in Tanzania: Distinguishing between the legitimate and illegitimate use of power

During the GEXcel visit I will work on a paper on the above topic, as part of my Ph.D project entitled  “Use or abuse of power?  Attitudes to violence against women and corruption in peri-urban Tanzania”.  I will analyse the transcripts of twelve focus groups discussions I carried out in Tanzania in 2006-7.   These generated data on men and women discussing the rights and wrongs of intimate partner male-on-female physical violence, locally known as ‘wife-beating’.  I will be looking at what socially shared norms and values participants refer to in their evaluations of wife-beating as they present them to one another.  Preliminary readings of the discussions suggest that the violence is related to and legitimated by ideas of appropriate power relations and labour divisions between men and women, and ideals of femininity and masculinity.  I have until now referred to Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘doxa’ and ‘symbolic violence’ in interpreting my data, but one reason for wanting to spend time in a GEXcel team during the analysis process is that I am looking for insights from other disciplines also looking at violence in relation to gender, power and subjectivities.  

Biographical notes:

Before starting her Ph.D., Hilde worked for international and non-governmental organisations in humanitarian emergencies, where she focused on issues of gender and violence. Working in East, West and Middle Africa, she became curious about her current research topic, namely how people distinguish between the use and abuse of power. She uses focus group methodology to look at how people reason about men’s violence against women in the private sphere and leaders’ corrupt practices in the public sphere. Her fieldwork has concentrated on peri-urban villages in two disparate districts in Tanzania. Her thesis is currently entitled “Use or Abuse of Power? Attitudes towards violence against women and corruption in two Tanzanian districts”.

Hilde’s educational background is interdisciplinary, in that her first degree was in Modern History (M.A., St. Andrews, Scotland), and her second in Criminology (M.Phil., Cambridge, England).  She is now pursuing her Ph.D. in Gender and Development at the multidisciplinary Faculty of Psychology, University of Bergen, Norway. She came to her studies having lived only in Africa, and therefore applied her studies to African contexts.  She wrote her history thesis on violent resistance in Namibia, and applied her criminology degree to understanding gender-based violence in Burundian, Congolese, Rwandan and Darfuri refugee camps.
Hilde is also a Technical Advisor on Gender-Based Violence in Emergencies for the UN Inter-Agency Standing Committee (IASC) surge capacity GenCap.