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 women’s and gender studies, abortion and reproduction, psychological counseling, emotion and affect studies as well as biography research.

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.

Doctoral Project

Frederika Schulte’s doctoral project “Abortion as Transition? A biographical study on the constitution and significance of the experience of abortion in the context of 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.

Presentations

Schulte Frederika (2024): Negotiating non-reproduction. The decision-making process around unplanned pregnancies in the context of mental health issues in Germany. Presentation in Panel “Practices and discourses of non-reproduction: exploring infrastructures of population control from non-procreationist perspectives”, Conference of the European Association for the Study of Science and Technology (EASST) and the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S). 16.-19. July, Amsterdam.

Schulte, Frederika/Gosain, Kritika/Gutleben, Clara/Pontius, Katharina/ (2024): Age, Pain and Vulnerability. Exploring the Relation of Age and Painful Experiences through the Method of “Age Blinding”. Presentation in Research Stream Linking Ages, Towards a Sociological Theorizing of Age Constructions Across the Life Course, 16th Conference of the European Sociological Association. 27. – 30 August, Porto.

Schulte, Frederika/Hann, Lena/Jorgensen, Erin (2024): Whether a shout or a whisper. Abortion storytelling as a catalyst for social change in Germany, Sweden, and the United States. Presentation in Panel “Free Communications”, 15th Conference of the International Federation of Abortion and Contraception Professionals (FIAPAC). 20.-21. September, Brussels.