Qualitative Data Analysis Session | Louis Strange | "Notes to Savita"

23 October 2019

Time: 2:00 - 4:00pm
Venue: Engineering 3.71

Our PhD student Louis Strange will start off the first "Qualitative Data Analysis Session" (QuDAS) of the term. He will present the following data:

In 2012, 17-week pregnant Savita Halappanavar died from septicaemia at University Hospital Galway after being denied a termination; her death can be viewed as a turning point in the push for legalisation of abortion in Ireland, as she became a symbol which galvanised the abortion rights movement. On 25th May 2018, when voters in the Republic of Ireland passed a referendum proposal to repeal the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution, thus lifting Ireland’s near total ban on abortion, members of the public started leaving hundreds of handwritten postcards and notes on a wall in Dublin where a mural of Savita Halappanavar had been painted. These “Notes to Savita” make up the current dataset, allowing us to look into the ways in which discourses of national identity and gender (in the context of the abortion referendum) were made salient by various semiotic practices.

Please take your laptops with you, since the session will deal with multimodal data.