Research Overview

Deirdre Duffy is a sociologist and applied social scientist. She has a specific interest in governance, resistance, and inequities. Her work primarily focuses on reproductive (in)justice, abortion access, and abortion activism. She explores these topics in a range of geographic and political contexts in the Global North and Global South and they are the subject of her monograph Abortion Trail Activism: The Global Infrastructures for Abortion Access (Bloomsbury, 2024).

Dr Duffy is passionate about 'research for policy' and the transformative potential of social policy research (the focus of her 2017 monograph Evaluation and Governing in the 21st Century: Disciplinary Measures, Transformative Possibilities, Palgrave Studies in Science, Knowledge and Policy). She has actively contributed to processes intent on minimising inequities in abortion access through legal and political reform in Colombia and (Northern) Ireland.