Interviewee: Anahita Seraji | Authors/Editors: Romina Garcia de leon, Shayda Swann (Weblog Co-coordinators)
Printed: June seventh, 2024
Are you able to inform us extra about your analysis?
My analysis focuses on girls’s generalized concern of males. It’s meant to handle the #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen debate that was happening a couple of years in the past, the place the #NotAllMen debate says that not all males try to harm girls. Not all males are a supply of concern. The #YesAllWomen debate says, ‘Sure, that is true. Nonetheless, girls proceed to expertise a generalized concern in the direction of all males, regardless.’ What I attempted to do with my analysis was to make use of behavioral studying rules, like concern conditioning and stimulus generalization, in addition to operant conditioning to handle three predominant questions. Why do girls turn into petrified of males? Why are girls’s fears generalized in the direction of all males? As an illustration, why is it that if you’re strolling down the road and a person walks by, you assume that man to be a risk? After which, how does the patriarchy make the most of girls’s fears to strengthen a prescribed social function? This query addresses the larger image of how, for instance, concern discount methods which were applied in insurance policies in the present day, that are largely targeted on behavioral pointers for girls like “put on this, do not exit at the moment, have like a whistle on you.” They normalize girls’s fears as a substitute of truly addressing the foundation trigger.
How did you become involved on this discipline of analysis?
I used to be impressed by my private expertise. I’m a fifth-year biology undergraduate at UBC, and after I began dwelling on campus as an undergraduate scholar I began listening to much more tales of ladies’s experiences. I used to be additionally having extra experiences of, for instance, getting cat-called. I’ve additionally at all times had a very large ardour for feminist work, psychology, and ladies’s well being. So in the future, I used to be sitting after a psychology class I used to be taking, and I felt like all the things clicked for me: girls have been conditioned all through time to behave a sure method. And our fears are getting used to regulate us and to power us into this prescribed social function inside the patriarchy. After which all the things else adopted from that. I hope this work can inform each women and men in regards to the energy dynamic that is happening right here, assist empower girls, and assist males turn into extra conscious of their influence and the way they will.
What analysis tasks are you engaged on now?
I am presently hoping to do some type of analysis on IUD ache administration. I volunteer with Entry BC, which is a marketing campaign that helped us get entry to free prescription contraception in British Columbia final April. That is an enormous win for us. I am actually completely satisfied to have been a part of that, however I spotted that though IUDs can be found, we nonetheless have a variety of girls who’re hesitant to get an IUD as a result of we do not have enough ache administration. I hope that my future analysis can concentrate on methods to attempt to implement girls’s ache administration in the course of the IUD insertion and removing procedures in order that we begin truly taking girls’s pains in healthcare critically. We have to cease brushing it apart, saying, ‘Oh, it is 10 minutes, otherwise you’ll be wonderful’ or ‘You may give delivery; that is nothing’. We need not trigger any extra hurt and we’ve got the capability to manage medicines, in order that’s precisely what we ought to be doing.
What influence do you hope to see together with your work?
if I can encourage a single particular person to make a distinction by way of my work, that could be a win for me. That is all I might ask for. Finally, I might actually like to see my work trigger systemic change and encourage coverage change. My curiosity in girls’s well being has impressed me to pursue drugs. I am very a lot fascinated about girls’s well being within the sense of pursuing drugs. I might like to have that influence of systemic change as a result of it is 2024 and the older I get and the extra time I spend doing any such analysis, the extra I get shocked that we’re nonetheless not in a spot the place we have to be in the case of girls’s well being. And I believe it is time that we’ve got change at a bigger scale in order that no lady has to ever fear about coping with extreme concern, ache, or the rest of that kind. I actually hope that my work can contribute to that.
