Education

Research

Research Interests

Gendered nationalism

Antigender movements

Discourse Studies

Irish and British Studies

PhD Project

Bodies, Borders and Belonging: Abortion in Northern Ireland’s Nationalist Imaginaries

My PhD research examines how two nationalist parties in Northern Ireland—Sinn Féin (SF) and the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP)—articulate support for abortion access within their competing nationalist projects.

The integration of pro-choice politics into nationalist agendas challenges long-standing feminist theories that portray nationalism as inherently masculinist and reliant on women as passive biological and cultural reproducers of the nation. This project focuses on the discursive strategies each party uses to make a pro-choice stance appear legitimate, coherent, and politically useful within their broader nationalist frameworks. It asks: How do these parties frame reproductive rights as compatible with, or even essential to, achieving their nationalist goals? What rhetorical and ideological resources do they draw upon to manage potential contradictions between nationalism and reproductive justice?

Drawing upon tools within Critical Discourse Studies, the study examines party manifestos, speeches, Assembly debates and news media coverage around a number of key moments between 1985 and 2023. It explores how each party negotiates tensions between gender equality and national sovereignty and how reproductive politics are mobilised to redraw the symbolic boundaries of the nation.

More broadly, the research considers how gender has become a central terrain of political struggle in Northern Ireland—no longer outside or beyond the constitutional divide, but deeply entangled in it. By tracing how reproductive rights are mobilised within competing visions of national identity, the project sheds light on how nationalist discourses both adapt to and shape broader social and political transformations around gender.