Josephine Chaet, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Summer / Fall 2019

Josephine Chaet is a doctoral candidate in the anthropology department at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) and an ACOR-CAORC pre-doctoral fellow for the summer and fall of 2019. Prior to her current fellowship at ACOR, Josephine was a Fulbright Research Scholar in Jordan during the 2018-2019 academic year. Her research while at ACOR focuses on the historical and contemporary experiences of womenโ€™s organizations and on the public actions of those associations over time.

Josephine Chaet in the ACOR Library, July 2019 (photo: Barbara A. Porter)

In its broadest sense, Josephineโ€™s dissertation explores the interactions between female organizational actors, legislative change, and the state. In 2017 the Jordanian Parliament repealed Article 308 of the nationโ€™s penal code, which allowed male rapists to avoid severe criminal sentencing if they married their female victims; that decision was in part attributed to the collective efforts undertaken by members of parliament and womenโ€™s organizations throughout the country. Taking that recent development as a point of entry, this dissertation project examines the ways in which womenโ€™s organizations in Jordan carve out spaces from which they have the potential to inform processes of legislative change. Josephineโ€™s ethnographic and historical approach to understanding the work of womenโ€™s organizations aims to illuminate the existence and importance of civil society organizations while decisively bringing gender into focus within scholarship on the state.

Josephineโ€™s work in Jordan specifically attends to womenโ€™s organizations located throughout Amman, where such associations have, since the mid-twentieth century, contributed to politically-oriented discussions throughout the country. While earlier phases of Josephineโ€™s research in Jordan utilized a mixture of participant-observation and in-depth interviews, this phase of her ongoing dissertation research project will devote time to archival work while continuing and building upon earlier aspects of this research.

Josephine received her Masterโ€™s in Anthropology from the University of Illinois โ€“ Chicago in 2018, and has conducted extensive language training and preliminary research in preparation for this phase of her dissertation research. She received her Bachelorโ€™s (with honors) in History and Anthropology from Grinnell College in 2016.

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1 thought on “Josephine Chaet, ACOR-CAORC Pre-Doctoral Fellow, Summer / Fall 2019”

  1. Pingback: The Movement to Abolish Article 308: A Brief Reflection on Womenโ€™s Activism in Amman, Jordan - ACOR Jordan

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