Jamie Morgan, PhD, MPA

Jamie Morgan is a policy scholar advancing abortion justice and a political scientist researching social movements.

C.V.

Dr. Jamie Morgan is an applied political scientist placed in the U.S. House of Representatives as a 2024 APSA Congressional Fellow in the Office of Democratic Whip Katherine Clark.
Jamie trained at the Heller School for Social Policy at Brandeis University, where she continues as a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Economic and Racial Equity.
Jamie’s dissertation research used a reproductive justice approach to study institutional processes, propose policy, and craft community responses. Embedded ethnographic research for her dissertation traced the intertwined story of reproductive care and contentious politics in a Midwestern community from *Roe* to *Dobbs*. She received the 2024 *Carole Joffe and Stanley Henshaw Early Achievement in Social Science Research Award* from the National Abortion Federation (NAF) for exceptional contributions to generating abortion-related knowledge.
She is an instructor for policy analysis and advocacy classes at Tufts University School of Medicine. Insights from her interest in experiential learning have been published in *PS: Political Science & Politics*.
Jamie holds a Master of Public Affairs from Indiana University South Bend. Her MPA research calculated the individual cost of state-level regulation on abortion seekers. Before her doctoral studies, she served the City of South Bend as senior staff in the Office of Mayor Pete Buttigieg. She managed policy, special projects, and legislative affairs with a portfolio emphasis on health and human services. As a community advocate, Jamie instituted the annual South Bend Pride Festival and helped open the only independent abortion clinic in Northern Indiana.

Dissertation

Advancing Abortion Justice:
An Ethnography of Gender-Based Violence and Contentious Politics at Clinics

Abortion access is at a crisis point in the United States, and achieving equitable reproductive futures requires examining our past. Abortion provision is determined by contested political geographies that reinforce or resist gendered power relationships. I propose anti-abortion violence is a form of gender-based violence mechanized by contentious politics observed in “entrenched contention.” Entrenched contention refers to social movement activity spatially fixed at a particular location. The study site, Whole Woman’s Health of South Bend, features a variety of spatial characteristics; these include proximity to supportive and hostile communities with limited resources and repertoires, and a built environment regulated by layers of authority.

This research contributes to abortion scholarship by placing into conversation the theoretical frameworks of gender-based violence and contentious politics. Contentious politics explains the mechanisms of harm, while gender-based violence conceptualizes and motivates the study of harm and guides the consideration of possible responses. These approaches aggregate multiple layers of analysis to understand how anti-abortion violence from movements and governments produces physical, sexual, psychological, economic, cultural, and social harm. Findings from this study offer a bold vision for abortion policy in a post-Dobbs America.

This study was born from my experience as an abortion advocate and organizer in a small Midwestern city. The investigation uses a “from-within” ethnographic approach to generate knowledge as research immersed in a social process. The case study draws from my movement experience, participant-observer fieldwork, interviews with pro-abortion participants, and archived institutional materials.

Dissertation Committee: Daniel Kryder (chair), Anita Hill, Rajesh Sampath, Carole Joffe

Defended on March 17, 2023

Abstract

Full Text