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 worry of males. It’s meant to deal with 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 are attempting to harm girls. Not all males are a supply of worry. The #YesAllWomen debate says, ‘Sure, that is true. Nevertheless, girls proceed to expertise a generalized worry in the direction of all males, regardless.’ What I attempted to do with my analysis was to make use of behavioral studying ideas, like worry conditioning and stimulus generalization, in addition to operant conditioning to deal with three important questions. Why do girls change into frightened of males? Why are girls’s fears generalized in the direction of all males? For example, 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, worry discount methods which have been applied in insurance policies right this moment, that are largely centered on behavioral pointers for ladies 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 really addressing the basis trigger.
How did you get entangled on this subject of analysis?
I used to be impressed by my private expertise. I’m a fifth-year biology undergraduate at UBC, and once I began residing 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 sooner or later, I used to be sitting after a psychology class I used to be taking, and I felt like every thing 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 pressure us into this prescribed social function throughout the patriarchy. After which every thing 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 change 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 glad to have been a part of that, however I spotted that though IUDs can be found, we nonetheless have lots 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 try to implement girls’s ache administration in the course of the IUD insertion and elimination 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 high-quality’ or ‘You can provide start; that is nothing’. We need not trigger any extra hurt and now we have the capability to manage drugs, in order that’s precisely what we needs to be doing.
What influence do you hope to see along with your work?
if I can encourage a single particular person to make a distinction by means of my work, that could be a win for me. That is all I may ask for. In the end, 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 desirous 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 on the subject of girls’s well being. And I feel it is time that now we have change at a bigger scale in order that no girl has to ever fear about coping with extreme worry, ache, or anything of that kind. I actually hope that my work can contribute to that.
