Dr Conlon was successful in securing funding for two projects. 

Project 1: Capturing The Pregnant Box Affect

Dr Catherine Conlon, School of Social Work and Social Policy

Dr Evangelia Rigaki, School of Music

In 2014 TCD Discover Research Night, Dr Evangelia Rigaki of the School of Music and Dr Catherine Conlon collaborated on an Opera project ‘The Pregnant Box’.  putting an applied policy research project concerned with concealing pregnancy in conversation with the highly stylised and ‘elite’ art form of Opera. The Opera Installation performance was theorised by us afterward as an instantiation unwittingly generating an iteration of analysis addressing what policy research looks like after post-humanism.  New ways of knowing (fertile subjectivity) got glimpsed but as this was an unanticipated effect of the Pregnant Box opera installation instantiation experimentation, we only managed to glimpse them. We were not prepared to capture these new, expansive, inclusive, democratic knowings generated with the naturalistically formed citizen/audience.  Thus, the importance of a second iteration of the performance. Firstly, convening a panel of inter-disciplinary scholars familiar with the intersection of (Reproduction) Policy and Creative Practice to observe and critique the project secondly, conducting systematic multi-modal data collection with audience contemporaneous to the performance.

Project 2: Supporting Responses to Reproductive Coercion in Irish Abortion Care

Dr Meg Ryan School of Psychology and

 Dr Catherine Conlon, School of Social Work and Social Policy

Reproductive coercion (RC) is defined as deliberate attempts to influence or control the reproductive autonomy of another person and evidence shows that coercive control escalates during pregnancy.   Currently however, limited research exists on this form of abuse, impeding identification of causal mechanisms, risk factors, cultural aspects and lived effects and hindering the development of effective and targeted interventions and supports.  Given how RC features within spheres of pregnancy and abortion, abortion services are in a unique position to address RC and provide screening and clinical interventions to improve health outcomes, already in place in antenatal care. This project will interview stakeholders working in abortion provision in Ireland  to explore how abortion providers encounter RC in practice and combine this data with secondary analysis of data previously gathered from DSGBV providers by applicant Dr Ryan and with people accessing abortion care by Dr Conlon.  Insights from analysis of this multifaceted data will be combined to generate a list of recommendations for managing RC in practice presented to stakeholders during a WorldCafe workshop to generate a toolkit for providers working at the intersections of Gender Based Violence and Sexual and Reproductive Health.