Before coming to the University of Cambridge, I did my Undergraduate at the University of Kent where I worked with Dr Charlie Hall to investigate childhood agency in Am Spiegelgrund, the largest child euthanasia hospital in the entirety of the Third Reich. This research revolutionised the way I researched and conceptualised the reification of agency, especially among marginalised groups.
I am now broadly interested in how “agency” materialises in reproductive justice. What does it mean to choose to do something, and how does societal pressure alter the decisions you make? At the time of writing this (2024/25), I hope to investigate this in the context of eugenics. I am particularly interested in California throughout the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries, where there was a lot of pressure on disabled people and racial minorities to get sterilised. My broad, draft research question is, “how much choice did individuals have over their sterilisation, and how important were principles of eugenics in making these choices?”
In future, I hope to research the historical context of autism studies to better understand the way we perceive autistic people in the present day.
