The Department of Global Development Studies congratulates Tineke Kippers on successfully defending her Master of Arts Thesis entitled, He only wanted to give me a child to take care of”: A Qualitative Analysis of the Everyday Social Reproduction Experiences of Haitian Women Raising Peacekeeper-Fathered Children.

Tineke's thesis explores the social reproductive experiences of Haitian women and girls raising UN peacekeeper-fathered children through a feminist and postcolonial epistemology which conceptualizes social reproduction as the processes of everyday life. Using Elias and Rai’s tripartite analytical framework of Space, Time, and Violence, she interprets eighteen qualitative interviews conducted with women raising peace babies in various communities across Haiti. In so doing, this research reveals some of the commonplace and overlooked aspects of social reproduction and the ways in which this labour is shaped by, and re/shapes, the spatiotemporalities of violence in Haiti.

Tineke argues throughout that themes of absence, abandonment, isolation/disconnection, transformation, and resistance characterize the everyday social reproduction work of these women. By demonstrating the structural and embodied violence which operate throughout the spaces and routines of these women’s everyday social reproduction, the contemporary effects of structures like colonialism, race, and gender are revealed. 

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