Kathryn Grey Ammon

Nationality: American.

Working Title of PhD: Legacy Data: Assembling 30 Years of Irish Abortion Narratives

Description of Research: My research engages with a unique data archive held by my supervisor which contains three decades of interviews with Irish women seeking abortion services—with two data sets being Irish women who travelled to British clinics, and the later set being post-repeal. Using the theoretical frameworks of Yuval-Davis and Deluze, this research hopes to understand how changing social policy around abortion materially affected women seeking abortion services over time, and their own relationships to their positionality, gender, and subjectivity. Using a mixed methods model of Constructivist Grounded Theory and “big” secondary qualitative data analysis, this work also seeks to understand traveling to access abortion as destabilizing traditional understandings of Irish motherhood and Irish citizenship in the postcolonial context. The relationship between gender and nation in Ireland has been well-documented in the context of abortion regulation—however, this archive is the only known large-scale collection of interviews with Irish abortion-seeking women and this data collection serves as a great opportunity to use secondary analysis methods to examine large-scale change.

Funder of Research (where relevant): PhD Provost’s Award.