Graduate Student, POLSIS
About
I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Birmingham (2006-2009) before starting an ESRC-funded 1+3 PhD in 2009.
My research engages with feminist accounts of abortion and reproductive policy in the United Kingdom, in particular with critiques of the role of the medical profession in overseeing and managing access to legal abortion. My thesis argues that the 1967 Abortion Act functions to contain the (otherwise near-ungovernable) practice of abortion in such a way as to negate or undermine abortion’s potential to disrupt dominant narratives of gender, motherhood and women’s life courses. It asks what it means, in this political and cultural context, when feminists engage with the state over abortion, and charts the discursive strategies employed by those engaging with the state, seeking to determine the extent to which pro-choice actors are able to sustain a coherent alternative to hegemonic discourses on abortion. As such, it connects to broader debates concerning political radicalism and processes of contestation more generally.
