Reproductive health: gendered and local-global dynamics

Course leaders
Haldis Haukanes, Professor, Department of Health Promotion and Development, UiB  
Astrid Blystad, Professor, Centre for International Health, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, UiB
Karen Marie Moland, Professor, Centre for International Health Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, UiB

Course lecturers
Lynn Morgan, Professor Emerita, Mount Holyoke College, USA
Getnet Tadele, Professor, Department of Sociology, Addis Ababa University, Ethiopia 
Agnieszka Kościańska, Professor, Institute of ethnology and cultural anthropology, University of Warsaw, Poland 

Through the lenses of ‘reproductive governance’ we will scrutinize the articulation between global policies/conventions and socio-political conditions that have implications for people’s reproductive health and rights. With particular emphasis on fertility control and safe abortion, we will analyse a series of cases from different theoretical and methodological angles to foster critical thinking on a set of gendered reproductive health challenges.

Learning outcomes
During the course, faculty and students will together unpack and analyse: 

• global governance structures and international conventions regulating the field of reproductive health and rights
• the interplay between policy, legislation, and moral discourse relating to women’s reproductive rights
• young men and women’s agency to handle their fertility within given legal, socio-economic, cultural and religious contexts 

The course employs innovative, student led approaches to learning in combination with lectures and workshops. 

Credits
Participation at the BSRS is credited under the European Credit Transfer System (ECTS). Participants submitting an essay, in a form of a publishable manuscript of 10-20 pages, after the end of the summer school will receive 10 ECTS. Deadline for submission will be decided by your course leader.

It is also possible to participate without producing an essay. This will give you 4 ECTS. In order to receive credits, we expect full participation in the course-specific modules, plenary events and roundtables.

Haldis Haukanes is a social anthropologist and professor at the Department of Health Promotion and Development, University of Bergen. She has done anthropological research in the Czech Republic for 25 years, studying among others the post-communist transformation in rural areas. She also been involved in gender-related research in Sub- Saharan Africa and has headed the NCR-funded project Gender in poverty reduction. Critical Explorations of Norwegian Aid Policy on Gender Equality and Women’s Rights. Her most recent publications include the edited volume Intimacy and Mobility in the Era of Hardening Borders. Gender, Reproduction, Regulation (with Frances Pine; in press; Manchester University Press)

Karen Marie Moland is professor at Centre for International Health, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen where she leads the Global Health Anthropology Research Group. She is a political scientist and has carried out research in Eastern Africa focusing on global-local dynamics in maternal and reproductive health policy and implementation. She has been heavily involved in collaboration with institutions in sub-Saharan Africa and has published extensively together with partners. The latest project, on safe abortion and fertility control, was published as a thematic issue ‘Reproductive health and the politics of abortion’ in 2019.

Astrid Blystad is professor at Centre for International Health, Department of Global Public Health and Primary Care, University of Bergen. She is a social anthropologist and has carried out long-term fieldwork in Eastern Africa. A main research focus has been the intersection between global and national health policy and local politics of reproduction. She has been PI of a series of research projects, the latest being Competing discourses impacting girls’ and women’s rights: Fertility control and safe abortion in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia. A recent publication is The access paradox: abortion law, policy and practice in Ethiopia, Tanzania and Zambia (2019).