Karissa Patton

Interdisciplinary Research Fellow

Biography

Karissa Patton is a historian of gender, sexuality, health, and activism. Her work explores local histories of reproductive and sexual healthcare, feminist health activism, and the politics of health and medicine. She uses a reproductive justice framework in my research to analyze local and regional landscapes of healthcare policy, on-the-ground health services, doctor-patient relationships, and activist health models.

Her research program includes histories of feminist self-help and self-exam health services in the 1970s Canadian West and Indigenous women’s health and motherhood activism in 1970s Alberta, Canada. As an Interdisciplinary Research Fellow at CBSS, she is conducting a comparative study on the history of reproductive and sexual healthcare and activism in Canada and the UK from the late 1960s to the 1980s.

Research

• History of reproductive and sexual health & healthcare in Canada and the UK 

• History of self-examination and women’s health activism in 1970s Canada

• History of feminist health models

• History of contraception, abortion, eugenics

• History & reproductive justice

• Oral history methods & theory  

Teaching

• BSc Biomedical Sciences, Project Supervisor