Paromita Sen

Paromita Sen is a Ph.D. Candidate in the Politics Department at the University of Virginia. Her research focuses on the intersection of gender and social movements, specifically those surrounding issues of women’s physical security and Violence Against Women. Her dissertation, ​When Protest Made the State, explores the recent phenomena of increased public interest in violence against women, evidenced by the spate of mass protests against rape in developing countries such as India and Turkey. She finds that governments use public outrage about rape to increase their punitive power over marginalized populations and strengthen their surveillance policies amongst others. Violence against women as an issue area proves to be particularly prone to State capture as it allows for narratives of protection and safety to supersede narratives of autonomy and citizen rights, thus justifying State co-optation of the movement, and democratic civil liberties by extension. The project therefore contributes a new approach to understanding the classical security-liberty debate, by reimagining how citizens perceive security and violence in the public sphere. Her additional research interests lie in the realms of women politicians and their relation to questions of representation and leadership, development interventions and their gendered consequences and questions of representation for marginalized and/or vulnerable communities.