Eva Kwakman

PhD Researcher

My PhD project focuses on how everyday urban violence becomes constructed in advocacy for safer and more accessible streets. Violence limits the right to the city by creating landscapes of threat, but public debate often renders it invisible and attempts to address it obscure its systemic, social-spatial causes by focusing on the individual behavior of victims or (scapegoat) perpetrators. Such is also the case with the understudied violences of traffic crashes and street harassment in Dutch cities, which constrain people’s routes and mobility as they navigate the streets. Within these two cases, I analyze the micro- and meso-narratives of survivors and civil society collectives working on the topic to understand how dominant/macro discourses of everyday urban violence are resisted and/or reproduced. In doing so, I aim to contribute to literature on mobility justice, traffic/vehicular violence, and gender-based violence by illuminating the everyday tensions and mechanisms involved in resistance, and their implications for inequalities in safety and im/mobility.