Future Projects

The first project, “Reproductive Justice through the Climate Crisis: Understanding Women’s Family Planning Practices and Sexual Health Concerns in the Unprecedented Present and an Unimaginable Future,” is funded by the ISR Next Generation Initiative and I am beginning to collect data this semester. Climate change is an existential threat to civilization and researchers recognize that massive structural change is necessary to address this crisis. As new lexicons of “climate anxiety” and “eco-grief” enter popular culture, many people are grappling with the impacts of their individual behavior. Increasing numbers of young people are choosing not to have children or are at least expressing deep ambivalence and reservation about raising children in the coming decades. This project will use qualitative interviews to investigate the family planning practices and sexual health concerns of women seeking sexual health care in the context of climate anxiety. I will extend recent scholarship about mothering experiences and reproductive decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic to the climate emergency. By illuminating the processes by which women make decisions about their sexual and reproductive health in times of great instability, this research will contribute to reproductive justice frameworks that center the goals of achieving racially equitable outcomes in perinatal health and motherhood experiences, raising children in safe and healthy communities, and making radical progress toward a sustainable future.

The second project, “Risk Ontologies and Embodied Practices of Reproductive Health Knowledge,” examines how similar embodied practices of fertility awareness—contraceptive choices, reproductive health knowledge, menstrual cycle monitoring—arise out of opposing ontologies for two groups of women: those trying to avoid pregnancy versus those trying to achieve it. These women are guided by divergent relationships to statistics and numeracy: the former group navigates a logic of risk (seeking to avoid unwanted pregnancy) while the latter group navigates a logic of chance (seeking to maximize the odds of conception). Using qualitative interviews and ethnography, I will explore how the embodied practices of fertility awareness constitute an unlikely site wherein women with differing relationships to sexuality and medicine—religiously devout women for whom contraception is prohibited alongside radical feminist-identfied women seizing the means of reproduction in a rejection of paternalistic medicalization—use the same technologies and engage in the same practices but with different underlying motivations, background knowledge, and engagement with science.