Caroline Hodge is a MD/PhD student in anthropology, earning her MD from the University of California San Francisco, and my PhD here at Penn, under the supervision of Adriana Petryna. Previously, she earned a master’s degree in medical anthropology from the University of Oxford. My clinical and scholarly interests converge on reproductive health and politics in the United States, and her dissertation focuses on contraception, asking how the diverse technologies and practices that fall under that rubric of contraception shape social life in the American Midwest.

Though contraception is synonymous with pregnancy prevention (colloquially known as “birth control”), it is also used to regulate menstruation, treat endometriosis, prevent migraine, and deal with a number of other gynecologic conditions. Caroline's Leboy-Davies funded research seeks to understand how contraception—which refers to a variety of technologies that work on or in a diverse set of users to achieve a disparate set of goals—far exceeds its mandate as “birth control.” Through ethnographic fieldwork in Kansas City that will take her into, for instance, family planning clinics, religious natural family planning counseling, and into people’s daily lives and routines, she seeks to understand how people articulate contraceptive desires and make contraceptive decisions. Caroline is especially interested in how contraception affects relationships: how does contraception change routines, alter intimacy, connect to broader life plans, and how do side effects bear on people and their partners? Her work positions these contraceptive trajectories in the context of the contemporary Midwest, where national debates about reproductive health and rights play out in increasingly contentious local politics. "The generous support of the Leboy-Davies Graduate Student Award will enable me to carry out pilot fieldwork for this broader project in the summer of 2019"

Year Award Received

2019