Start-up seminar for MEDRA
Researchers, students and administrative staff were together for two days discussing progress and content in this interdisciplinary project. The main focus is to look at how medical knowledge is mobilized in debates about abortion in Argentina, USA and Ireland from the 1980s.
Argentina, USA and Ireland are three representative democracies whose history of abortion legislation illustrates the complexity of different understandings of democracy, and the extent to which the concept of democracy itself is mobilised to support opposing positions.
Despite disagreements on the meaning of democracy and its relation to abortion in all three cases, all sides of the debate agree that the right to abortion is inseparable from the right to health and is therefore a medical matter.
Corpus-based analysis
The method used in MEDRA is a corpus-based analysis to discover critical analysis of the medical, legal and grassroots discourses under study with narrative analysis. SHE has developed the Oslo Medical Corpus together with Genealogies of Knowledge developed. Read more about Oslo Medical Corpus here.
A visible project
Head of the project, Professor Eivind Engebretsen, says he is very happy to have started this project:
– I am so proud and honoured to have some of the most interesting researchers and ambitious students on board. The project is very important, we want to understand the use of knowledge in the discussions on abortion in democratic societies. These days we have been looking at case studies and research questions, and we have planned public activities in the coming years and starts with remarkable events March 8, 2024.
Student Fellows
The two students are employed in Circle U. as Student Fellows. They are hired for a 20 % position in one academic year.
– The students as partners are important. Their knowledge and innovative way of thinking will be useful to the project. And hopefully will they get inspired to develop projects in their study field, says Engebretsen.
Here is more information on MEDRA.
UiO:Democracy
UiO:Democracy aims to establish a collective ownership to research on democracy. What is democracy? How do democracies work in practice? How can they be undermined, how can we maintain and strengthen them? These are some of the questions raised in the interdisciplinary research initiative UiO:Democracy.
Here is more information on UiO:Democracy.