University of Helsinki
Tracy Morison:
‘We are not OK until we are all OK’: Advancing Reproductive Health, Justice, and Well-Being in Social Research
Social Psychology has long been interested in contributing to human wellbeing and social change. Today, responding to rising global inequalities, a growing variety of voices call on social justice paradigms to address pressing social issues. Among these issues are pernicious sexual and reproductive inequities, central to the ongoing social marginalisation of women (broadly defined). In this presentation, I make a case for the Reproductive Justice framework as a particularly apposite lens for understanding and addressing sexual and reproductive politics. This framework, I shall demonstrate, usefully connects reproductive issues to underlying gendered socio-political complexities. It requires, moreover, that researchers not only evaluate the power relations structuring participants’ sexual and reproductive lives, but that we also confront and question the power structures in which research programmes and questions are located. Reproductive justice—as a research framework as well as a wider movement and praxis—requires knowledge producers to rethink the ‘who’ and ‘what’ of our understandings and representations of ‘human well-being’. The aim of my talk, therefore, is to demonstrate not only how a Reproductive Justice approach can help to understand and improve sexual and reproductive health and wellbeing, but also contribute to the ‘wellbeing’ of the discipline of Social Psychology.