Meghan Daniel
Graduate Student
Sociology
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
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About
Previous degrees:
B.A. Sociology and Women’s Studies, Providence College
M.A. Sociology, University of Illinois at Chicago
Specialty Areas:
Gender and sexuality; social movements; reproductive health, rights, and justice; abortion access; race and ethnicity; health and medicine; state violence; feminist theory; race, class, gender; bodies and embodiment; culture; qualitative methods.
Bio:
Meghan Daniel (she/her) is a Sociology PhD candidate and Gender and Women’s Studies concentrator at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research focuses on the politics of social movements, people’s lived experiences of organizing for social justice, reproductive justice, and intersecting systems of state control.
Meghan has years of experience researching abortion access within a reproductive justice framework. Her past work examines feminist leadership and margins to center organizing practices within an abortion fund, and can be found in a special issue of Mobilization. She has worked as part of a research team with Chicago Abortion Fund to investigate abortion stigma within pro-choice communities; the results of this qualitative project impacted on-the-ground cultural and communications strategy in Chicago and Illinois. She is also currently a co-investigator on a community-engaged research project examining the gendered, racialized, and classed landscape of abortion access in Illinois after the passing of House Bill 40, which allows Medicaid funding for abortion services. This project, based at Chicago Abortion Fund, centers people who have had abortions in order to shape change.
Her dissertation employs archival, in-depth interview, and ethnographic methods to examine the historical and contemporary connections between social movements for reproductive justice and against state violence. She finds that organizers use cultural tactics, such as artwork and storytelling, in addition to material ones, to drive organizing and shift movement frames, thus connecting people, organizations, and social movements. This work draws on scholarship from social movements, criminalization, culture, and race, class, gender to foreground the embodied experiences of organizers and ground them in deep histories of mobilization.
Her research has generated four peer-reviewed articles and one book chapter, and can be found in Sociology Compass (forthcoming), Mobilization, American Sociology Review, Sociology Compass, and Advances in Gender Research.
M.A. Thesis Title:
From “Transactional to Transformational:” Reproductive Justice and Margins to Center Organizing
Dissertation Working Title:
Reproductive Justice as Resistance: Historical and Contemporary Activism Against State Violence & Gendered Racial Capitalism