February 2024: Dr. Sara McClelland participated in the celebration of Jennifer Jone’s book: Ambivalent Affinities: A Political History of Blackness and Homosexuality After World War II

Zoom Recording | Event Details

In this interdisciplinary historical study, Jennifer Dominique Jones reveals the underexamined origins of comparisons between Black and LGBT political constituencies in the modern civil rights movement and white supremacist backlash. Foregrounding an intersectional framing of postwar political histories, Jones demonstrates how the shared non-normative status of Blackness and homosexuality facilitated comparisons between subjects and political visions associated with both. Drawing upon organizational records, manuscript collections, newspaper accounts, and visual and textual ephemera, this study traces a long, conflicting relationship between Black and LGBT political identities that continues to the present day.

This event is part of IRWG’s Gender: New Works, New Questions series, which spotlights new books by our faculty. This event will be presented in-person and include a raffle for attendees to win a free copy of the book!

Participants : 

JENNIFER DOMINIQUE JONES (author of Ambivalent Affinities), Assistant Professor of History and Women’s and Gender Studies

AVA PURKISS, Assistant Professor of American Culture, Obstetrics and Gynecology, and Women’s and Gender Studies

SARA MCCLELLAND, Associate Professor of Psychology and Women’s and Gender Studies

August 2023: Dr. Sara McClelland presents: “Abortion and deservingness: The role of psychological research in understanding abortion attitudes in the U.S.” as the 2023 Lynn Stuart Weiss Lecture, an annual lecture given at the APA convention in memory of Lynn Stuart Weiss, a promising scholar whose interests centered on the science and art of politics, with a focus on world law.

The role of everyday attitudes, beliefs, and emotions introduce a set of barriers that remain largely invisible, but deeply shape the environment around those who seek abortion care. In this talk, Dr. McClelland will focus on associations and stereotypes about women of color in the U.S. that continually shape how abortion is imagined and policed. She argues that racist ideologies, including cultural images like that of the “welfare queen,” are woven into the fabric of how abortion is imagined, assessed, and legislated. In her work, she traces the historical development of ideologies regarding women’s sexuality and how laws instruct a nation how to think about the trinity of sex education, contraception, and abortion.

May 2023: Dr. Sara McClelland presents: “Abortion Identities Beyond Pro-Choice and Pro-Life: Examining “Both” and “Neither” Response Options” during the 78th Annual American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) Conference.

The labels “pro-life” and “pro-choice” are often used in abortion research without additional response options, which offers little insight into the extent to which these two categories accurately capture people’s abortion identity. We asked participants (N=1,075) about the dimensions of their beliefs in order to investigate those with ambivalent abortion identities.

April 2023: Dr. Sara McClelland is an Invited Discussant at 70th Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, “Gender, Resilience, Integration, and Transformation.” Across the 70-year history of the Nebraska Symposium on Motivation, we have focused on motivation, broadly construed. The purpose of the 2023 Symposium is to bring together a group of scholars in the areas of gender and sexuality to elevate and highlight research on joy, pleasure, resiliency and wellbeing in gender-diverse folx.

February 2023: Dr. Sara McClelland joins invited experts for Leveraging Social/Personality Psychology to Address Contemporary Social Issues during The Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP)’s 2023 Annual Convention, Invited Symposia.

Historically, psychologists have been able to leverage their expertise and research in ways that provide commentary on important societal issues. Reflecting ongoing efforts to "give psychology away," four talks present some of the most cutting-edge research into psychological phenomena that have recently dominated public discourse. Specifically, four engaging speakers will present on perceptions on the legacy of racism, racial attitudes related to voter ID laws, the role of racist and sexist attitudes in shaping perceptions of abortion, and why people defend the gender/sex binary.

February 2023: Dr. Sara McClelland presents: “Abortion and deservingness: The role of psychological research in understanding abortion attitudes in the U.S.” in U-M ADVANCE Lunch Series Talks.

Much of the research on abortion focuses on the person who needs care and what gets in their way, including for example, denials, costs, and time delays. Dr. McClelland focuses on a different part of this picture: the beliefs of those near and far to this person seeking care and what they think about abortion. The role of everyday attitudes, beliefs, and emotions introduce a set of barriers that remain largely invisible, but deeply shape the environment around those who seek abortion care.

January 2022: Dr. Sara McClelland joins invited experts for “After Roe: Michigan Experts Discuss Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization” at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender to discuss the Supreme Court heard arguments in the Mississippi case, which would make most abortions illegal after 15 weeks of pregnancy (roughly two months earlier than the 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade); including implications for the future of abortion access across the states and reproductive rights and justice in the U.S. more broadly. The oral argument recording and transcript are available here.