Addressing photography as a feminist socially engaged arts practice in the movement for abortion rights in the North or Northern Ireland.

Abstract

This thesis offers a unique demonstration of socially engaged practice contributing to the transformative abortion rights movement in Northern Ireland. ‘Addressing photography as a feminist socially engaged arts practice in the movement for abortion rights in Northern Ireland’, examines photography, performance and activist campaigning produced by the author on abortion in the arts from 2010-2019. The exegesis of this practice-based research project offers various new contributions to knowledge:

Primarily, this active research project offered a key contribution to the success of the campaign to decriminalise abortion in Northern Ireland, whilst accounting for the (re)productive labour of feminist activists, especially Alliance for Choice (AfC). It includes unprecedented archival research into women photographers in the UK via historic printed journals (Campbell, 2014), as well as primary interviews with and oral histories of former feminist photography collectives Format and Hackney Flashers. The archival research interlinked with and informed the concurrent abortion arts practice-led research for abortion in Northern Ireland. The photographic practice adds fresh cultural artefacts to the visual terrain feminists have been clawing back from anti-abortion tropes (Petcheskey, 1987) despite widespread silence on abortion in 2012. Made from within the abortion activist collective, AfC, the practice offers new exemplars of emancipatory empathy for abortion and offers restitution to the invisible labour of a movement. Presenting a socially engaged feminist praxis, the research tests elements of Butler’s (2018) theory of performative assembly and Azoulay’s (2008) theory of photography as a social relation, reinterpreting their theories through an abortion lens. Addressing the question of photography as a socially engaged praxis, this thesis theorises its potential, illustrating it as a vibrant, optimistic and dialogically engaged practice. Finally the research celebrates the feminist labour of those who have been active in making change through creative practice both historically across UK and Ireland and now.

Date of Award	Feb 2024
Original language	English
Supervisor	Suzanna Chan (Supervisor) & Cherie Driver (Supervisor)