The topic of this conference is now more urgent than ever. With the overturning of Roe v. Wade in June 2022 abortion has been catapulted to the centre of the Western political stage. While the United States, as well as European countries such as Poland, have been experiencing a rollback of abortion rights, Latin America has seen a transnational momentum towards the decriminalisation of abortion, most recently in Argentina, Mexico, and Colombia. With ideas, movements, people, and pharmaceuticals traversing the many borderlines around abortion, it has become more vital than ever to think about abortion at (and transgressing the borderlines of) nation-states, legality, and social acceptability.
The conference will take place online and in person at King’s College London on 27th and 28th April 2023. We are particularly looking to examine three critical strands of enquiry:
- Abortion in transnational perspective; how do people travel to seek abortion? How do abortion materials travel across borders? How do anti-abortion movements, discourses, funds travel across borders? What are the sexual and reproductive health and rights implications and how do these affect inequalities in abortion access?
- Abortion as social, cultural and political transgression; how do discourses and practices of feminist abortion activism transgress acceptability, normativity and legality? Which stories are being told about abortion? What emotional registers are mobilised in activism for and against abortion?
- Abortion and imaginations of national identity and citizenship; how do discourses of abortion feed into or disrupt ideas about nation-building and citizenship? Who can abort and who is discouraged? How does abortion operate at the margins of the law, the state and society?
We welcome abstract submissions from scholars across different disciplines, who apply feminist and decolonial lenses to their research. We especially encourage PhD students and early career researchers to submit their work. We also welcome submissions from activists and practitioners working directly with abortion-related issues in the field. Further, we are particularly interested in papers that seek to bridge the gap between transnational activism across regions (for instance between Latin America and Europe). Panellists will have the opportunity to disseminate abridged versions of their papers on Feminist Perspectives. We will also aim to work towards putting together a special issue journal edition from the conference submissions. Please note that lunch will be provided during the conference and Feminist Perspectives may be able to contribute to the travel costs of participants who are unable to procure funding elsewhere. Unfortunately, we will not be able to cover accommodation costs.
We invite prospective panellists to submit abstracts of no more than 250 words. We also welcome panel proposals of 2-4 individuals. In the case of a panel submission, please include a summary of no more than 250 words of the overarching aims of the panel, details of the panel chair, as well as the individual abstracts for each panel speakers. Please send your abstracts to both Saskia Zielińska (saskia.hoskins@kcl.ac.uk) and Lea Happ (lea.happ@kcl.ac.uk) with the title 'Abortion on the Borderlines Conference: Abstract Submission' as the title by December 31st 2022. We look forward to receiving your submissions and will aim to be in touch to communicate the acceptance of selected abstracts by January 20th 2023.