“Coalition-Building With New Orleans MCH”
by Emma Allen
This summer I continued my internship with the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition as a research assistant under Dr. Daniel. My role is to aid in an evaluative research project for the New Orleans Maternal and Child Health Coalition, but like most research projects, there are waves of activity. So this semester I focused primarily on organizational and transitional tasks.
My biggest task was working with the reference management software, Zoterro. In Zoterro, I work with scholarly articles and sources for Dr. Daniel’s research project. I organize them, make sure they have a citation, and find new sources to add to Zoterro. My primary task was moving sources from another storage software over to Zoterro and creating citations for them. Within Zoterro I also scanned over the research sources to create subfolders and organize the files by topic. One of my continuous tasks is to add new sources and create new citations throughout the semester.
Near the end of the summer term, I started helping with other tasks related to Dr. Daniel’s research projects, specifically dealing with Post Roe v. Wade. One of the topics is researching sources that talk about anti-abortion arguments but are specifically about the well-being of the woman. This includes sources that use the argument of women’s health to take away women’s rights. For example, arguments that abortion will result in depression for women or the emotional toll of abortion is too much for women. Trap laws fall into this category, because trap laws are usually marketed as protecting women’s health. Researching this topic and researching why this angle is so effective will be a big task in the fall semester.
It has been amazing to be in this program, especially after the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision, and I look forward to continuing this fall.