These are some of the questions that I explore in my dissertation.

Healthcare workers and their roles in Sierra Leone’s reproductive landscape: I ask how healthcare workers conceive of their own roles within the reproductive healthcare system in Sierra Leone. I focus primarily on contraception as one aspect of reproductive health in this project. I interview healthcare workers on their conceptions of reproductive rights, their own experiences and perspectives with contraception and seeking reproductive care in Sierra Leone, and on their relationship with the reproductive healthcare job sector in Sierra Leone. I also conduct participant observations at health clinics, key informant interviews with high-ranking health and ministry officials, and content analysis on training and policy documents related to reproductive health and family planning.

Anxieties of Reproduction: Narratives of Infertility in Sierra Leonean Films: Here, I examine how infertility shows up in Sierra Leonean narrative films. Infertility is an understudied aspect of reproductive health in demographic and policy research. Population policies also largely focus on contraception and other aspects of reproductive health and support for the stigmatized topic of infertility is lacking. In this project, I use narrative films made in Sierra Leone to understand cultural meanings of infertility and expand the ways in which demography and policy research can capture and understand infertility as an area of inquiry.

Partner Age Gaps in West Africa: Co-authored with Anna Bolgrien (Institute for Social Research and Data Innovation, University of Minnesota). We combine multiple large demographic surveys to examine trends in partner age gaps across time in the West African region. This project is a descriptive quantitative project that attempts to understand how husband-older partner age gaps have evolved over time. West African nations have some of the highest average partner age gaps in the world. We find that the average age gaps are declining over time, however there is a lot of heterogeneity in these patterns by country, education, wealth quintiles, residence, and other socio-demographic variables.