Research Team

Principal Investigator

Dr. Benita Heiskanen

Heiskanen will study the ways in which the Reproduction Wars are constructed, performed, and visualized for strategic purposes. Building on her prior project (Heiskanen 2022) on the Texas Campus Carry legislation, she will analyze the performative practices of verbal-sonic-visual materials used by anti-abortion activists and the transborder abortion networks. As the principal investigator, she will supervise the fieldwork period and conduct an ethics review on the project.

Researchers

Dr. Niko Heikkilä

Heikkilä examines anti–abortion policing of women’s reproduction to explain how anti–abortion organizations mobilize people to surveil abortion seekers and providers. He will study the ways in which Dobbs and Senate Bill 8 together produced a momentum shift in favor of the anti–abortion movement in Texas and analyze how anti-abortion groups in Texas responded to the new laws both in terms of assisting in and going beyond conventional policing of abortions. Heikkilä will also design the project’s primary source and document archive.

Dr. Pekka M. Kolehmainen

Kolehmainen examines the weaponization of imaginaries in the Reproduction Wars. To complicate the common view of how abortion fits into the Culture Wars, Kolehmainen maps out a range of different rhetorical registries used in promoting anti–abortion views. He will also be in charge of the project’s rhetorical laboratory.

Dr. Michael Hansen

Hansen will design a nationally representative quasi–experimental survey, which will investigate how levels of support for abortion policies and women’s reproductive health are conditional on the concepts used to represent these topics in survey questions.

Ph.D. Researcher Nadia Nava Contreras

Nava maps the transborder responses to the legislative shift in Texas. On the Mexican side of the border, Nava focuses on abortion accompaniment organizations and pro-life organizations. By focusing on embodied experiences of abortion mobilities, both on the practical and discursive levels, she will design the online archive’s
collection of lived experiences in Spanish, containing anonymous first-hand experiences and interviews.