The PSC Brown Bag Series runs live and on Zoom this year, Mondays from 12 to 12:50 p.m.

This PSC seminar, “Taking the population control out of family planning measurement,” will be from Leigh Senderowicz from UW-Madison’s Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.

This talk will explore the ways that the ideology of fertility reduction permeates the design and evaluation of contemporary family planning projects, nearly 30 years after the International Conference on Population and Development called for an end to population control. The talk will draw from the Contraceptive Autonomy Study, a project designed to explore various dimensions of autonomy and coercion in family planning, and to develop new understandings about why and how contraceptive coercion manifests. This presentation will focus specially on modes of measurement, and the challenges to designing new demographic and health measures that better assess person-centered and justice-based approaches to contraceptive care.

Leigh Senderowicz is a social demographer and critical global health researcher. Leigh currently serves as an assistant professor of gender and health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, with a joint appointment between the departments of Gender & Women’s Studies and Obstetrics and Gynecology. Leigh earned her doctorate in public health from Harvard, and her Masters of Public Health from Johns Hopkins, focusing on global reproductive health. Her interdisciplinary work focuses on contraceptive coercion and autonomy, exploring the ways that new approaches to measurement and evaluation can promote person-centered care and reproductive freedom.