Utrecht University invites applications for a PhD research position at the Faculty of Geosciences in a project examining local policy variation on abortion clinic buffer zones in the Netherlands and its national rescaling potential.
Your job After decades of increasing sexual and reproductive rights, the controversy surrounding abortion has been reignited by the rise of right-wing conservatism across Europe. In this tense climate, powerful political actors and different social groups are increasingly competing for their right to claim city space as the arena from which to inform and control the public opinion. On the one hand, pro- and anti-choice demonstrations reveal how the debate around abortion has shifted from the political to the public sphere, making city space a vital terrain for gender and reproductive politics. On the other, the proliferation of local policy tools to safeguard access to abortion in the face of state conservatism points to cities’ role in enacting a new moral frontier in the fight for reproductive rights.
To unravel the scalar entanglement of gender, (city) space, and morality in the abortion debates, this PhD project zooms in on the micro-geographies of abortion clinic buffer zones in the Netherlands. Following the recent resurgence of a militant anti-abortion movement whose activists increasingly line up outside abortion clinics, pro-choice groups have been advocating for the adoption of a national buffer zone law to keep protesters away from patients and protecting the privacy and wellbeing of those seeking to terminate a pregnancy. While, to date, the Dutch parliament has failed to find an agreement on this matter, a series of medium-sized and large municipalities – including The Hague, Rotterdam, and Arnhem – have been able to pass their own local policies to regulate disruptive clinic protests.
By connecting political geography scholarship on scale with feminist and moral geography, this PhD project engages buffer zones as the spatial manifestation of contentious reproductive politics in the Netherlands and offers a novel point of departure from which to conceptualise and study the gendered right to the city. It also investigates how local buffer zone policy could be rescaled to the national level, as well as the challenges and opportunities this would yield.
The tasks of the PhD candidate will include the following:
- carrying out qualitative research activities. Possible methods include - but are not limited to – policy analysis, ethnographic observation, and expert interviews in selected Dutch municipalities with and without a functioning buffer zone;
- publishing research results in the form of academic papers and policy reports, as well as through creative forms of dissemination (e.g. podcast, blog);
- co-organising public engagement activities (e.g. one or more expert meetings with a variety of stakeholders to reflect on the project’s findings and recommendations for policy, one or more public events for lay audiences to facilitate discussion about the wider social, cultural, and political implications of the urban struggle over reproductive rights).
In addition to research-related activities, the PhD candidate will contribute to transposing the findings of the project into regular urban geography and planning education at Bachelor's and Master's level as well as into training for professionals.