Frederika Schulte, M.A.

Frederika Schulte studied Empirical Cultural Studies and Educational Science (B.A.) and completed the Master’s program ‘Research and Development in Social Pedagogy/Social Work’ (M.A.) at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. Her research interests include the examination of social and cultural theories, psychosocial counseling, emotion research, and women’s and gender studies with a focus on reproductive health as part of social participation and gender equity. From 2021-2022, she was a research student in the DFG Research Training Group “Doing Transitions. The formation of transitions over the life course.” and wrote her master’s thesis there on the topic of abortion as a possible subject of transition research. Today, she is a research associate and fellow in the same project and continues to research the intertwining of abortion and transition narratives in the context of her dissertation.

N E W S

Interview-participants wanted!

You have already had an abortion in your life?

Are you interested in talking about your experience?

Then please feel free to contact me via e-mail or phone!

Doctoral Project

Frederika Schulte’s doctoral project “Abortion as Transition? A biography-theoretical investigation of the relational production and integration of abortion in the life course” (working title) first deals with the general question of the extent to which the event of an abortion can represent the subject of so-called “transition research”. In transition research – which has long since focused not only on “status passages from adolescence to adulthood” but also on social phenomena such as the “change between different spheres of life and situations” (Andresen et al. 2022: 9) – there is a growing interest in such transitional performances that are “aborted, halted, or go wrong, i.e., cases of transitional deviance” (Wanka 2020: 194). Abortion thus represents an epistemically promising research object, as the social production and shaping of both transitions and terminations can be observed and explored here.

To examine these processes in more detail, she conducts biographical interviews with people who have had (at least) one abortion in their lives. The guiding research question is: How is the termination of an unwanted pregnancy biographically integrated by the persons concerned, and to what extent do life course-related constructions of termination and transition come into play?

A central component of the research is a relational and intersectional perspective on the subject matter: abortion is understood as a phenomenon that only emerges through a specific interaction of different elements and is repeatedly produced situationally. She is particularly interested in the role that the elements of interpersonal relationships, bodily experience, and “speaking about” abortion play in biographical processes.

Publications

Bomert, Christiane; Lohner, Eva Maria; Schulte, Frederika (i.V.): Macht in der Beratung. Empirische Befunde zu Machtverhältnissen in der Schwangerschaftskonfliktberatung. In: Lohner, Eva Maria; Böhm, Maika; Bomert, Christiane; Krolzik-Matthei, Katja (Hg.): Ungewollt Schwangere beraten – Theoretische, empirische und praktische Perspektiven. Psychosozial Verlag.