Center for Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies

Mairéad Smith is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. Her research examines how conflict-related sexual violence is responded to in post-Daʿesh (ISIS) Iraq through law, humanitarian interventions, and survivor-led advocacy. Her dissertation explores how women from diverse ethnic and religious communities navigate the aftermaths of sexual violence and mass atrocities, and how transitional justice mechanisms shape recognition, redress, and exclusion. Drawing on 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork, she investigates how legal, bureaucratic, and activist "grammars" render certain harms legible and how women themselves take up, resist, or reframe such grammars of violence. Her work engages questions of the circulation of discourses and practices associated with rape as a mass crime and the hierarchies of violence produced in humanitarian response to sexual violence.