Barbara Baird

After completing my PhD about South Australian women's experiences of illegal abortion (before 1970), and almost a decade working and teaching at Flinders and Adelaide University, in 1999 I went to the University of Tasmania in Hobart where I coordinated the Gender Studies program for seven years. I have been in the discipline of Women's & Gender Studies at Flinders University since 2006.

My interdisciplinary research covers the cultural politics and histories of sexuality and reproduction in C20th & C21st Australia, using approaches which foreground the intersections of gender and sexuality with race and national identity. This has focused on abortion, queer politics and representations of children and 'the child'.

I am part of a research group with colleagues from Macquarie University that is investigating the history of 'sexual citizenship' in Australia since the late 1960s (ARC Discovery Project DP170100502 2017-2019).

My current major project is writing the history of the practice of abortion in Australia since the early 1990s.

I am currently the Co-Convenor of the South Australian Abortion Action Coalition (saaac, see https://saabortionactioncoalition.com/). saaac's goal is to improve SA peoples' access to abortion services and to normalise abortion as health care. We led the campaign which achieved the decriminalisation of abortion in SA in March 2021.