I have a number of ongoing research projects that are at different stages of completion. Below is a sample of these works, including the collaborative teams involved.
Improving maternal health in the Philippines
Since 2000, national campaigns across Asia have attempted to improve utilization of maternal healthcare to combat persistently high maternal mortality rates. Yet, affordable and readily available maternal healthcare services, including mental health services, continue to be underutilized. Poor data collection, analysis and reporting exacerbate the problem by obscuring underlying reasons and coverage gaps. Taking the Philippines as a case study from which future scale-up opportunities may be developed, our project aims to design and assess the feasibility and acceptability of a technology-supported intervention and improve data collection, harmonization, utilization, and reporting through capacity building with local providers and government agencies.
Our team of international female scholars in political science (Professors Sarah Shair-Rosenfield and Maria Ela Atienza), medical sociology and public health (Professor Susan McPherson), computer science (Dr. Aikaterina Bourazeri), and management (Dr. Danielle Tucker) brings a unique set of expertise and in-depth country knowledge to address this issue in the Philippines. Together with Ms. Zenaida Dy Recidoro, a practitioner who is the former manager of the Philippines’ National Safe Motherhood Program, our interdisciplinary team’s approach more closely reflects the factors that influence and complicate women’s and policy stakeholders’ access to information and decision-making processes regarding women’s health behaviour and care utilization. Our team is working to develop a technology-supported intervention for women and healthcare providers in the Philippines, such as a mobile phone application (app), that improves coordination between the national health agency, local governments, and healthcare providers by enabling sustainable data collection, harmonization, utilization, and reporting of data on women’s health.
Combatting violence against women in politics in Indonesia
Gender-based electoral violence is a global phenomenon, with female candidates and elected officials facing distinct and heightened challenges to their physical security during the process of campaigning for public office. Yet, studies of sensitive material — such as the personal experiences of violence by highly visible and easily identifiable individuals — are difficult to broadcast because the act of communicating such stories often places already vulnerable individuals at greater risk. We focus on Indonesia, the world’s third-largest democracy, where the 2024 general elections will include thousands of candidates running for public office at all levels of government.
We have assembled an international team of scholars from politics (Professors Sarah Shair-Rosenfield and Reed Wood), gender studies (Professor Laura Sjoberg), youth and culture studies (Dr. Oki Rahadianto Sutopo), and academic and professional dramatics (Dr. Amy Bonsall) to accomplish a multi-phase project. By drawing on expertise and creative methods from more than one country and culture, and involving the whole team in co-design and co-creation with local artists, our integrative approach will help to overcome many challenges inherent in interdisciplinary work and lead to ground-breaking outputs to combat VAWIP.
Gender, Language, and Political Leadership
To what extent does the gendered nature of language shape societal associations about leadership, particularly who is and what it means to be a “good” leader? In this project I examine contemporary shifts in the gendered characteristics of political leadership. I first explore how language and linguistic structures can shape how individuals think about gender and gender-based differences in social, economic and political rights. Then I consider how changes in societal gender norms and gendered language use are reflected in gendered associations of leadership.
This project builds and expands on two collaborations. The first is previous works with Professor Amy Liu that analyses how gendered linguistic structure shapes support for gender egalitarianism and interethnic group sentiment. The second is a series of ongoing papers with Professor Melody Valdini that examine the conditions under which commonly-accepted leadership characteristics are perceived to be more or less gendered.
Sarah Shair-Rosenfield 