Dr Sydney Calkin

Reader in Human Geography

Email: s.calkin@qmul.ac.uk
Telephone: +44 (0)20 7882 3153
Room Number: Geography Building, Room 107
Website: https://sydneycalkin.com/
Office Hours: Semester A: please email to arrange a time Semester B: Thursday, 1-2pm in Geography room 107

Profile
Teaching
Research
Publications
Supervision
Public Engagement

Profile

I am an interdisciplinary feminist social scientist with interests in political geography and International Relations. My work addresses questions at the intersection of gender, political geography and reproductive technology.

I am motivated by an intellectual interest in the political and economic processes that sustain gender inequalities and a personal commitment to feminist political change and reproductive justice.

Since 2016, my research has explored the phenomenon of self-managed abortion. My research asks: if states are unable to control the flow of medication abortion pills across borders, while flows of these pills grow steadily, how can states continue to enforce restrictive abortion laws? How are political and legal debates about abortion be transformed by growing access to safe self-managed abortion? This project is the subject of my new book Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders.

From 2024 - 2029, I will undertake a major new research project on self-managed sexual and reproductive health. I will lead a team of researchers to study treatment communities and pharmaceutical products that are used for self-managed health and sourced through transnational online networks. This project was awarded as a European Research Council Starting Grant, and is now funded as a UK Research & Innovation Frontiers Grant. It will be hosted at Queen Mary University of London in the School of Geography.

Teaching

I lead the fieldtrip module GEG5152/GEG6152 Belfast: Political Geography in the Post-Conflict City.

Research

Research Interests:

Abortion Access Beyond the Nation-State (2017-2023)

From 2017-2020, I held a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship to carry out a project on the changing geographies of abortion.

This project started from the question of how abortion access was being changed by new technologies and transnational activist organizations. Its primary focus was on medication abortion pills, including the digital networks through which information about them was shared and the pipelines through which the medications crossed borders.

The project had three goals: First, to examine changing technologies and geographies of abortion access; Second, to study the changing nature of state power borders as states create new barriers to abortion access; and third, to understand what abortion pill flows meant for the relationship between women, the state, and reproduction. I carried out research for the project in Ireland, Northern Ireland, Poland, and the USA between 2017-2023.

I published this research in my recent book Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders, out with University of California Press.

Pharmaceutical Geographies of Self-Managed Sexual Health (2024-2029)

From 2024 - 2029, I will lead a team of researchers in the School of Geography at Queen Mary University of London on an exciting new project exploring how transnational communities organize themselves to obtain medications and self-managed sexual and reproductive health treatment.

People self-manage sexual and reproductive health activities outside of formal health systems because the products and treatments they want are unavailable, unaffordable, or stigmatized. The expanding global market in pharmaceutical products and technologies, combined with the growth in digital platforms where treatment communities organise, has transformed the geography of health.

This project combines social and natural science methods to study three transnational treatment communities in sexual and reproductive health (SRH), together with the pharmaceutical products they use: sex hormone therapies for gender transition; Pre- and Post-exposure Prophylaxis for HIV prevention; and medical abortion pills for pregnancy termination.

I will lead the project as the Primary Investigator. The research team will include three post-doctoral research associates hosted in the School of Geography who will use qualitative methods to carry out the social science aspects of the project. It will also include a team in the QMUL School of Chemistry, where Dr Roberto Buccafusca will supervise a chemistry technician to test the pharmaceutical products in the study.

This project won a European Research Council Starting Grant in 2023 (worth €1.5million). It is now fully funded by the UKRI Horizon Europe Guarantee scheme (for grants delayed by the EU-UK association agreement) and it will be carried out entirely at Queen Mary University of London. The project will launch in October 2024.

Publications

Books

2023. Abortion Pills Go Global: Reproductive Freedom Across Borders. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. More information and reviews available. here.

2020. After Repeal: Rethinking Global Abortion Politics. Browne, K. and Calkin, S. (Editors). London: Zed Books.

2018. Human Capital in Gender and Development. Routledge Studies in Gender and Global Politics. London: Routledge.

Articles

2024, forthcoming. "‘It’s Not Mifepristone, But It’s Not Poison’ Finding Fakes in Poland’s Abortion Underground." Cambridge Journal of Anthropology, special issue on fake meds.

2022. "The geography of abortion: Discourse, spatiality and mobility." Progress in Human Geography 46(6): 1413-1430. Co-authored with Cordelia Freeman and Francesca Moore (Equal authorship split, 33/33/33) DOI: 10.1177/03091325221128885

2022. "Legal geographies of medication abortion in the USA." Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 47(2): 378-392. DOI: 10.1111/tran.12506

2021. “Legal and non-legal barriers to abortion in Ireland and the UK” co-authored with Ella Berny. Medicine Access @ Point of Care [open access].

2020. “Transnational Abortion Pill Flows and the Political Geography of Abortion in Ireland” in press at Territory Politics Governance 9(2): 163-179.

2020. “Persistence and Change in Morality Policy: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Politics of Abortion in Ireland and Poland”, co-authored with Monika Ewa Kaminska. Feminist Review no. 124 Special Issue on Abortion in Ireland (pages 86-102).

2019. “Towards a Political Geography of Abortion.” Political Geography. 69: 22–9.

2019. “Healthcare Not Airfare! Art, Abortion and Protest in Ireland.” Gender, Place & Culture. 26(3): 338–361.

2018. “Trails and Technology: Social and Cultural Geographies of Abortion Access”, co-authored with Cordelia Freeman. In press at Social and Cultural Geography

2017. “’Disrupting’ Disempowerment: Neoliberal Feminism and the Private Governance of Gender and Development.” New Formations, special issue on ‘Righting Feminism’, 91: 69–86.

2016. “Globalizing ‘Girl Power’: Corporate Social Responsibility and Transnational Business Initiatives for Gender Equality.” Globalizations 13(2): 158–172.

2015. “’Tapping’ Women for Post-Crisis Development: Evidence from the 2012 World Development Report.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 17(4), 611–629.

2015. “Feminism, Interrupted? Gender and Development in the Age of Smart Economics.” Progress in Development Studies 15(4), 295–307.

2015. “Post-feminist spectatorship and the Girl Effect: ‘Go on, really imagine her.’” Third World Quarterly 36(4), 654–669.

Supervision

I currently supervise four doctoral students: Sam Moir-Smith, Ella Berny, Melisa Slep, and Shruti Arora.

I have helped student to win funding for PhD programmes from the ESRC (LISS DTP), AHRC (LAHP DTP) and QMUL Vice Chancellor's Fellowship. I'm happy to help students develop proposals for these and other funding schemes.

I am interested in supervising projects related to the following themes: sexual and reproductive health, reproductive technology, feminist political geography, abortion access, embodied health movements, health and treatment activism

If you're interested in working together, please contact me with a CV and short summary of your proposed PhD project.

Public Engagement

My work has been widely covered in British, American, and European media outlets including BBC, New York Times, Guardian, and more. An up-to-date list is available here.

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