I met with my faculty mentor, Dr. De Jesus, on Thursday, December 6th for about 30 minutes. We discussed the feasibility of doing a discourse analysis on the Garza v. Hargan case and the implications of the current political climate on my research. [1] In addition, we discussed the intersection of health and migration and how Jane Doe exemplifies this intersection as well as the intersection of immigration and abortion discourses.

My next steps for my research include finding and systematically organizing data, whether that is more court documents, social media posts about the case, news articles, and/or the comments on those articles. Another thing that I need to look into is access to NVivo or ATLAS.ti through the library to be able to do keyword and phrase searches of my documents. Dr. De Jesus suggested looking for patterns of phrasing that construct Jane Doe as a criminal and as an innocent minor using this software.

Over break I plan to read through more court documents from the case and try to construct some sort of timeline to clarify the legal process and how that influences the discourses of migration and abortion that Jane Doe exists at the intersection of. I also plan to read more scholarship on migration and health and their potential impacts on one another.

A concern that I have going in to SISU-306 is some confusion over the legal terms used in the court documents. To resolve this issue, I would be interested in talking either to an SIS professor with a law background and/or a professor at AU’s law school.

 

[1] Garza v. Hargan, On Petition for Rehearing En Banc. United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit No. 17-5236, filed on 24 October 2017.