overview/
My research rethinks how abortion and reproduction are understood, refusing frameworks that reduce them to individual choices, technical problems, or matters of access alone. Instead, I examine how reproductive lives are shaped through relations, structures, governance, and how they unfold over time—and how these are contested, resisted, and remade.
I am an interdisciplinary researcher working on gender and reproductive (in)justices in the Global Souths (broadly understood). My work is grounded in long-standing engagements with feminist movements, collectives, and organisations that are actively making abortion care possible—often in ways that exceed, circumvent, or directly challenge formal systems, whilst actively creating and sustaining alternative infrastructures of care and possibility.
Methodologically, I work primarily with qualitative, visual, creative, co-produced, and archival approaches. Analytically, I focus on how power is produced and exercised across everyday practices, infrastructures of care, and regimes of governance—and how it is lived, negotiated, and contested in reproductive life.
My research agenda currently consists of four interconnected strands:
critically rethinking safety and risk in abortion and reproduction, showing how these are produced through uneven social, political, and economic conditions rather than secured through clinical or legal regulation alone;
reconceptualising self-managed abortion as a collective, networked, and transgressive practice sustained through feminist infrastructures of care, rather than an individual act occurring outside formal systems;
tracing reproductive trajectories to foreground how abortion and other reproductive experiences accumulate over time, shaping embodied futures in ways that cannot be captured through episodic or event-based approaches; and
analysing population policies and reproductive health interventions as forms of governance, which organise, discipline, and stratify reproductive life while sometimes also presenting themselves through the language of choice, voluntariness, rights, and care.
Across these strands, my work is concerned with how abortion is not simply accessed but made possible—and with the forms of labour, knowledge, and care that sustain it, often in spite of the systems that purport to regulate or provide it.
Rather than treating policy, law, or healthcare as the primary site of solution-making, my work examines how they operate alongside other forms of governance; producing categories, distributing legitimacy, and shaping what forms of reproductive life become possible or marginalised. Thus, I attend to how change is enacted not only through formal reform, but through practices that exceed, unsettle, or operate alongside regulatory systems.
These concerns come together in my current research project, “Any Poison or Other Noxious Thing”, which examines how abortion is governed through practices of investigation, evidence-making, and interpretation in Great Britain, demonstrating how law, medicine, and the state actively produce meanings of care, responsibility, and deviance through processes of surveillance and punishment.
Taken together, my work foregrounds abortion as a site through which power is exercised, negotiated, and resisted—and asks/imagines what it would mean to organise reproductive life beyond the constraints of existing legal, medical, and policy frameworks.
My peer-reviewed research is linked here, and I detail work that is in preparation here.
My doctoral research (LSE Department of Social Policy, 2019) was a multimethod study investigating women’s abortion-related trajectories to care in Karnataka, India. During my ESRC postdoctoral fellowship (2020-2021), I extended this work to co-produce visual abortion resources with an Indian non-profit organisation.
My research is deeply informed by feminist thought, including reproductive justice. I understand research as a political process and remain committed to making visible the multiple ways in which power operates—not only within my areas of inquiry, but also within the processes of knowledge production itself.