Welcome to Sarah Bodelson's dissertation defence. Sarahis a doctoral student at the Department of Global Political Studies at the Faculty of Culture and Society.

Title of the dissertation

Knowledge Production, Space-Making, and Solidarities in Removing the Abortion Ban in Ireland

Faculty opponent

Professor Eithne Luibhéid, University of Arizona, USA

Examining committee

• Professor Lena Martinsson, University of Gothenburg, Sweden
• Associate Professor Michael Strange, Malmö University, Sweden
• Associate Professor Martina Angela Caretta, Lund University, Sweden
• Associate Professor Juan Velasquez, University of Gothenburg, Sweden (reserve member)

Public defence chairperson

Professor Kristin Järvstad, Malmö University

The dissertation defence will be held in English. The defence is open to all, and no registration is required.

Abstract

In May 2018, Ireland’s abortion ban was removed through a landslide vote. In the preceding months, the pro-choice and reproductive justice movement was transformed into the temporary referendum campaign Together for Yes (TfY), which was set up to coordinate activists and mobilise voters to remove the abortion ban.

Through semi-structured interviews and participant observation with activists committed to repealing the abortion ban, the thesis explores what implications this transformation, from a movement to a campaign, had on the politics of knowledge production, space-making, and solidarities in the movement. Theoretically situated within and contributing to the field of Global Politics, the thesis combines Black, postcolonial, and decolonial feminist and queer theoretical thought, and more specifically, a reproductive justice, transnational feminist, and queer decolonial translocal lens.

Combined, these allow for exploring the relations of power in feminist political organising, the possibilities and pitfalls of striving for legal change to achieve structural change, and the de- and re-politicisation of social justice commitments in the current historical conjuncture of neoliberalism, state bordering, and reproductive racism.

The thesis shows how the transformation from a grassroots movement into a professional campaign involved the strategic silencing and exclusion of multiply marginalised political subjects and how this, in turn, made the creation of spaces for political education and belonging outside the campaign more important. The thesis, furthermore, engages with the contestations and ambivalences regarding the possibilities of focusing on law to achieve reproductive justice and the role of solidarities and translocally situated activists in movement-building.

Concluding, the thesis highlights the potential of a reproductive justice and queer decolonial translocal lens to denationalise, repoliticise, and polyvocalise understandings of political ‘success’ in struggles for reproductive justice.

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