Examining digital and emerging technology for contraceptive provision and use in Australia.
Facing the decline in contraceptive innovation and investment from pharmaceutical companies, rising rates of unintended pregnancy in Australia, and enduring dissatisfaction by users of contraceptives already available, Cecily’s PhD research explores digital technologies as an alternative avenue in contraceptive provision and use. From tracking apps and telehealth, to ‘smart’ condoms, hormonal profiling and implantable microchips, many of these technologies pride themselves on being user-led and for meeting various user-defined contraceptive priorities, such as non-hormonal, non-invasive, and user-controlled. Yet who constitutes a user and who has access to define these priorities remains limited by feminised, cisgendered, heteronormative, and racialised assumptions that have clouded contraceptive provision and use since the inception of the Pill in the 1960s. As such, these technologies continue to operate according to exclusionary and alienating rhetorics, further bolstered by a wave of novel concerns regarding efficacy, safety, security, and accountability.
Through the lens of critical digital health studies and feminist technoscience, Cecily thus seeks to analyse this new generation of contraceptive technologies by questioning who they are designed for, what values are inscribed within them, by whom, why, and with what effect. Through qualitative research, Cecily also hopes to work alongside an expansive group of contraceptive users to reclaim and reconstitute those user-defined priorities and shape the future of digital contraception.
Cecily Klim (she/her) is an ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society (ADM+S) funded PhD student at UNSW. She has a BA(Hons) in Sustainable Development from The University of Edinburgh, and an MA in Visual Anthropology and MSc in Social Research, both from Goldsmiths College, University of London. Her academic background has provided a springboard from which to explore STS, feminist theory, and the sociology of health with an interdisciplinary and future-oriented logic. Cecily is particularly interested in the politics of representation and, having worked through film, sound, storytelling, and arts workshops, she is dedicated to the use and development of creative and arts-based methods for social research and public engagement. Alongside academia, Cecily writes about and participates in craft movements, such as ‘new domesticity’, with particular focus on weaving, knitting and sewing, and their ‘technofeminist’ socio-political histories.
