Challenging Pronatalism Is Key to Advancing Reproductive Rights and a Sustainable Population

Social and environmental justice organisations have silenced discourse on human overpopulation due to fear of any association with reproductive coercion, but in doing so they have failed to acknowledge the oppressive role of pronatalism in undermining reproductive autonomy. Pronatalism, which comprises cultural and institutional forces that compel reproduction, is far more widespread, and as damaging to individual liberties as attempts to limit reproduction. The failure to recognise the enormity of pronatalism has led to the wholesale abandonment of voluntary, rights-based efforts toward a sustainable population despite widespread scientific agreement that population growth is a major driver of multiple cascading environmental crises. We examine the full range of patriarchal, cultural, familial, religious, economic and political pronatalist pressures, and argue that the reluctance to address population as a driver of the ecological crisis serves the very pronatalist forces that undermine reproductive autonomy. We posit that addressing overpopulation, and the pronatalism that drives it, must be central to international conservation and development efforts to elevate reproductive rights while also promoting planetary health

Challenging Pronatalism Is Key to Advancing Reproductive Rights and a Sustainable Population

Social and environmental justice organisations have silenced discourse on human overpopulation due to fear of any association with reproductive coercion, but in doing so they have failed to acknowledge the oppressive role of pronatalism in undermining reproductive autonomy. Pronatalism, which comprises cultural and institutional forces that compel reproduction, is far more widespread, and as damaging to individual liberties as attempts to limit reproduction. The failure to recognise the enormity of pronatalism has led to the wholesale abandonment of voluntary, rights-based efforts toward a sustainable population despite widespread scientific agreement that population growth is a major driver of multiple cascading environmental crises. We examine the full range of patriarchal, cultural, familial, religious, economic and political pronatalist pressures, and argue that the reluctance to address population as a driver of the ecological crisis serves the very pronatalist forces that undermine reproductive autonomy. We posit that addressing overpopulation, and the pronatalism that drives it, must be central to international conservation and development efforts to elevate reproductive rights while also promoting planetary health

Obstetric Violence & Colonial Conditioning in South Africa's Reproductive Health System

This dissertation outlines the relationship between obstetric violence, and colonial era conditioning. Examining South Africa’s post-1994 public health system, I argue societal norms, political-economic arrangements, health systems, and their policies, have established structural violence which generates and spreads a continuum of violent practices within reproductive health services. The rationalisation and obfuscation of violence against Black women throughout the colonial and apartheid periods, including coercive contraception protocols, indexes more than simply gender-based violence in health services. I propose a theoretical underpinning: obstetric structural violence to explain what I argue is a particular type of violence against women. I interrogate the systematic violation of sexual and reproductive health rights enacted by health systems, resulting in: 1) non-consensual constraint of reproductive autonomy, 2) preventable maternal and neonatal disability, 3) mortality. Part 1 analyses the colonial conditioning that led to health services becoming constitutive of racial, and gendered structural violence. Historical stereotypes of sexuality are linked to rationalisations of contemporary obstetric violence. Examining the political-economy of the democratic period, Part 2, demonstrates how constant reform and limited power undermine low-level managers capacity to ensure the functioning of accountability, thereby propagating obstetric violence. Drawing on extensive qualitative fieldwork within seven primary–tertiary hospitals, I describe how routine, as well as episodic, physical and psychological forms of direct obstetric violence are pervasive. I argue these outcomes prove the connection between obstetric violence, adverse health, and obstetric malpractice, a fact often absent from related literature. Lastly, I argue the resultant case law and individual awards from obstetric malpractice for incurred patient harms, encourages the invisibility of obstetric, and obstetric structural violence

Climate Change Denial and Public Relations

This is the first book on climate change denial and lobbying that combines the ideology of denial and the role of anthropocentrism in the study of interest groups and communication strategy. Climate Change Denial and Public Relations: Strategic Communication and Interest Groups in Climate Inaction is a critical approach to climate change denial from a strategic communication perspective. The book aims to provide an in-depth analysis of how strategic communication by interest groups is contributing to climate change inaction. It does this from a multidisciplinary perspective that expands the usual approach of climate change denialism and introduces a critical reflection on the roots of the problem, including the ethics of the denialist ideology and the rhetoric and role of climate change advocacy. Topics addressed include the power of persuasive narratives and discourses constructed to support climate inaction by lobbies and think tanks, the dominant human supremacist view and the patriarchal roots of denialists and advocates of climate change alike, the knowledge coalitions of the climate think tank networks, the denial strategies related to climate change of the nuclear, oil, and agrifood lobbies, the role of public relations firms, the anthropocentric roots of public relations, taboo topics such as human overpopulation and meat-eating, and the technological myth. This unique volume is recommended reading for students and scholars of communication and public relations

A pragmatist context-based assessment of the economic implications of eating patterns in a small sub-Saharan developing economy: Focus on Togo

Healthy nutrition is recognized as essential to a productive workforce and strategic in preventing healthcare costs. Meanwhile, food supply system proficiency requires socially coherent organizational efficiency. Sub-Saharan Africa is widely presented in agro-food economics literature as a cultural block whereas it enfolds context-specific nations with specific biophysical and historical ties. This thesis aims to determine the importance of investigating country-specific diets’ effects on economic welfare. Equally, it emphases national food system governance on which globalization, socio-economic and demographic transitions are increasingly influential. Normative, critical and grounded in poststructuralism and cultural/relativist pragmatism, the thesis shifts focus from generic material challenges emphasized in economic reports to gaps in substance and framework of Sub-Saharan Africa food economy studies. Suggesting that policy failure largely owes to the lack of focus on the nurture side of policy-formulation equations, the nature of information and how information is sought are emphasized as paramount problematics. Consequently, an in-depth qualitative investigation on Togo is undertaken. It entails a cross-sectoral analysis of data from the public/private food and healthcare sectors and civil society. Critical ethnography and alethic hermeneutics methodologies induced dialogue-provoking discussions with local respondents via surveys, semi-structured/structured interviews and observation through both social immersion and distance. The insider scrutiny aims to uncover valuable metadata possibly unobservable in nonspecific/quantitative studies. Informed by a multidisciplinary abductive reasoning, theoretical frameworks underscore concepts as value chain governance, new governance, global value chain, food anthropology- social psychology, demography and fertility linked to food supply concerns. Jointly, from a philosophical position, implications of individual liberty, societal values/norms on diet and economic productivity are also considered. Such approach, targeting a holistic understanding of links between diet and economic status while shifting from generic to specific paradigms and from traditional empirical value system to ethicist/normative value system, has proven to be relevant. Results suggest that some patterns/trends in literature as dietary evolutions’ links to demographic transition for instance are applicable. However particular historical and socio-political contexts trigger a spectrum of varied reactions. This applies to nutrition knowledge, perception regarding food types, agricultural work, collaboration, or state-civil society power relationship. Biophysical components also contribute in the span of historical and dietary constructs and social stratification of cultural groups. Dismissing a non-normative governance theory, the thesis concludes that because nutrition status reflects governance model and power balance between civil society and food/healthcare stakeholders, policy must be integrative and considerate of the merits of traditional values within their biophysical and cultural context. In pursuit of efficient and sustainable model of governance, the thesis indicates windows of opportunity for further qualitative studies on food-related challenges at the state level in Sub-Saharan Africa as to highlight other concealed influential factors. This calls for perspectives closer to specific needs and motivations of local populations, major players in social transformation

Discovering the New Place of Learning

The book explores the potential of learning outside the traditional classroom when students gain real-world experiences in a variety of contexts and public spaces such as built, natural and virtual landscapes, museums, heritage sites, science centres and community venues. The authors of the book promote and put the flexible and ‘plastic’ concept of a place of learning into action by including physical geographical location, digital, virtual and textual spaces into the analysis. The book illuminates the importance of innovative educational strategies in connecting formal, non-formal and informal education – experiential learning in museums, heritage places and communities, inquiry-based pedagogy, digital storytelling, environmental online games, narrative geographies, and the use of geospatial technologies

Reproductive Migrations: Surrogacy workers and stratified reproduction in St Petersburg

Surrogacy is an arrangement whereby a woman conceives in order to give birth to child or children for another individual or couple to raise. This thesis explores how commercial gestational surrogacy is culturally framed and socially organised in Russia and investigates the roles of the key actors. In particular it explores the experiences of surrogacy workers, including those who migrate or commute long distances within and to Russia for surrogacy work and the significance of their origin, citizenship, ethnicity and religion in shaping their experience. Ethnographic fieldwork was carried out in St Petersburg between August 2014 and May 2015 and involved semi-structured interviews, (participant) observations, informal conversations and ethnographic fieldnotes with 33 surrogacy workers, 7 client parents, 15 agency staff and 11 medical staff in medical and surrogacy agency facilities. Data were analysed using inductive ethnographic principles. A reflexive account, which includes a consideration of the utility of making one’s own emotional responses a research tool, is also included. Drawing on and expanding on Colen’s (1995) conceptual framework of stratified reproduction and Crenshaw’s (1989) analytical framework of intersectionality, this research shows that surrogacy in Russia is culturally framed and therefore socially organised as an economic exchange, which gives rise to and reinforces different forms of intersecting reproductive stratifications. These stratifications include biological, social, geographic, geo-political and ethnic dimensions. Of particular novelty is the extension of Colen’s framework to address geographic and geo political stratifications. This was based on the finding that some women (temporarily) migrate or commute (over long distances) to work as gestational carriers. The thesis also demonstrates how an economic framing of surrogacy induced surrogacy workers to understand surrogacy gestation as work, which influenced their relationships with client parents. Given the rapid global increase in the use of surrogacy and its increasingly internationalised nature, this research into the social organisation of commercial gestational surrogacy in Russia is timely and has implications for users, medical practitioners and regulators, as well as researchers concerned with (cross-border) surrogacy and reproductive justice