Urban Development as a ‘Condition of Possibility’ for Domestic Violence: Tracing the Multi-scalar Impacts of Post-War Urban Regeneration on Colombo’s Working-Class Poor
A BSA Sociology, Psychoanalysis & the Psychosocial Study Group Seminar Series
8 September 2025 (15:00-16:00 BST)
Online
About the Event
The Sociology, Psychoanalysis & the Psychosocial Study Group seminar series on violence has been running since November 2024. The seminar series is held online and normally takes place on the first Monday of the month (there may be some exceptions around UK holidays).
Speaker: Asha L Abeyasekera
Speaker bio: Asha L Abeyasekera is a lecturer at the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. Prior to arriving in York, she was a Urban Studies International Fellow at Royal Holloway, University of London, and a lecturer at the University of Colombo, Sri Lanka. Her research interests are marriage and kinship; home and homemaking; and morality, emotions, and personhood. She is the author of Making the Right Choice: Narratives of Marriage in Sri Lanka (2021, Rutgers).
Event Summary: My paper explores urban development as a ‘condition of possibility’ for domestic violence in working-class communities in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, I build on the concept of ‘evictability’ – the role urban evictions play in the governance of ‘unwanted’ citizens (Van Baar 2017) – to propose ‘intimate evictability’ – a lens to examine the multi-scalar and gendered impacts of Sri Lanka’s post-war urban regeneration policy on Colombo’s working-class poor. I begin by drawing attention to how mechanisms of constraint were historically built into the architecture and urban planning of Colombo to produce the carceral geographies of contemporary working-class homes and neighbourhoods. Drawing on women’s life-stories, I then discuss how forced evictions of working-class communities in post-war Sri Lanka interface with the intimate sphere and percolate to the home in the form of inheritance disputes and domestic violence. By drawing attention to geography as a lived experience that plays a critical role in the production of intimate relations (Shabazz 2015), I make a case for why bureaucratic processes that disenfranchise the poor must be read as existing on the same continuum as acrimonious kinship relations that are about incarcerating or discarding unwanted women.
Registration
This event is free to attend but registration is required.