Jess Marie Newman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Cornell University. Her courses include "North African Feminisms," "People and Cultures of the MENA," "Anthropology of Public Health," and "Introduction to Medical Anthropology." Her first book manuscript, "Unsafe: Deserving Abortion in Morocco," is currently in preparation. The book explores abortion activism and care in Morocco, unraveling how international media and pressure politics directly influenced abortion provision and care seeking at a local hospital stuck squarely in the limelight of Morocco’s abortion debate. "Unsafe" highlights the contradictions of providing and seeking abortion care in contexts where the procedure is illegal. Morocco provides the grounding case study elucidating how global abortion politics and public health agendas targeting unsafe abortion intersect with local institutions and ideologies. Through fine-grained ethnographic analysis, the book demonstrates that banning abortion, legislating abortion into inaccessibility, making medical abortion inaccessible, and criminalizing abortion seekers and providers are all ingredients in the making of unsafe abortion. In Morocco, unsafe abortion thus indexes many things: the legal vulnerability that both practitioners and patients face, encounters that expose vulnerable people to financial extortion and emotional abuse, harmful procedures performed both inside and outside of medical contexts, and political retribution for speaking out about abortion. She first began engaging with issues related to abortion and sexuality in Morocco while on a Fulbright IIE Fellowship in 2008, and has received a fellowships from US Department of Education's Foreign Language and Area Studies (FLAS) and The American Institute for Maghrib Studies (AIMS). She is the former President of the AIMS Student association. Her research interests include anthropology of the body and reproduction, feminist theories of the state, triage, biopolitics, the post/colony, and gender and security.

Anthropology

Ethnography

Gender/Women's Studies

Maghreb Studies

Theory

Queer/LGBT Studies

Globalization

Media

Development

Human Rights

Colonialism

Health

Transnationalism

Maghreb

Morocco

Mediterranean Countries

Sexuality

Feminist Activism

Medical Anthropology

French (fluent)

Moroccan (advanced)

English (native)