Research

Nazila Kivi is a PhD fellow at the Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University.

Her current research project is focused on reproductive justice and minoritization, entitled ”Birthing the (M)Other: Gender, race and reproduction in Denmark. A collaborative arts-based exploration of minoritized women’s experiences with health care and maternity”. The project provides insight to minoritized women’s own experiences with childbirth and motherhood intersected by categories like race and racialization, gender and ethnicity while developing collaborative and democracy-based research methods.

The research participants who are minoritized individuals who have experiences with reproductive health care in Denmark are an active part of the research as collaborators and co-creators of new knowledge. They contribute via workshop participation and writing and are involved in the initial analytical steps. Thus emphasis is directed towards how the intersections of motherhood, minoritization/racialization are experienced within a neoliberal and seemingly post-racial welfare state as Denmark.

The in-depth analysis of the writings of the collaborators, reveals themes of grief, slow death and unmarked loss, the circularity of trauma and the unnoticedness of everyday violence.

Short bio:

Nazila holds an M.A. in Cultural Encounters and Communication from Roskilde University (2020) and a B.Sc. in Public Health Science with Gender Certificate from University of Copenhagen (2016).

Currently she is enrolled as a PhD fellow at Department of Communication and Arts, Roskilde University. Her PhD project examines how care is distributed along gendered and racial lines in the health care system, and women and queer individuals’ experiences of pregnancy, antenatal care and birth-giving . As a former student research assistant of Public Health research at Copenhagen University (The MAMAACT project), and as an experienced cultural critic, essayist and translator of literary fiction, Nazila makes use of autoethnography as well as arts-based methods, in particular Collective Memory Work and creative writing, bringing together critical race and posthuman feminist theories with creative and transdisciplinary methods.

Nazila has worked with reproductive health since 2002, including sex education and family planning, women’s health and reproductive justice, feminist theory, the medicalization and pathologization of the feminine body, women's body as a contested political arena and arts-based responses to gendered violence and she has an extensive body of work of writing, including essays, magazine and art catalogue contributions and translations of fiction from Persian to Danish. 

Language proficiency:

Persian/Dari ('farsi'), Danish/Scandinavian, English

Education:

2020: M.A. in Cultural Encounters and Communication, Roskilde University

2016: B.Sc. in Public Health with Gender Certificate, University of Copenhagen

Previous studies in Medicine at University of Copenhagen

Selected PhD courses:

2022: Summer School at Utrecht University: Humanizing Birth. Launching Critical Midwifery Studies

2022: Autoethnographic Methods, Roskilde University

2022: Exploring New Materialisms/Space: University of Copenhagen

2023: Academic Writing as Creative Praxis. Roskilde University.