Laura Kelly
Biographic Data
| ID | 3604273 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Kelly |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Kelly |
| SIGNATURE | KELLY L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Birmingham |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1454-9240 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 107 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1983 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
‘It’s a really empty feeling’
This article explores women's experiences of miscarriage and pregnancy loss in late-twentieth-century Ireland. Drawing on oral history interviews, newspaper and magazine articles, the newsletters of the Miscarriage Association of Ireland, and women's memoirs, it demonstrates how understandings and experiences of miscarriage and pregnancy loss in late-twentieth-century Ireland were considerably shaped by Ireland's wider sociocultural context. As w…
Youth Defence, young people and anti-abortion activism in Ireland, c. 1992–97
This article explores the first five years of the Irish young people’s anti-abortion group Youth Defence. Using newspaper articles and archival sources, I illustrate how the group effectively mobilised the category of ‘youth’ in their activism. ‘Youth’ was used to excuse their militant activities and any violence associated with the group. I also argue here that while the group’s activism was profoundly influenced by American campaigners, their r…
Depo-Provera, Class, Race, and the Domiciliary Family Planning Services in Glasgow and Haringey, 1970–1983
In 1976, the Committee of Safety of Medicines (CSM) in Britain authorized the contraceptive injectable Depo-Provera (DP) for short-term use and for two main reasons only: if a woman had received a rubella vaccine or if her partner had just undergone a vasectomy. Although officially authorized on restricted grounds only, the drug appears to have been widely prescribed by doctors of the Domiciliary Family Planning Services (DFPS). This article take…
Contraception and Modern Ireland
Contraception was the subject of intense controversy in twentieth-century Ireland. Banned in 1935 and stigmatised by the Catholic Church, it was the focus of some of the most polarised debates before and after its legalisation in 1979. This is the first comprehensive, dedicated history of contraception in Ireland from the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the 1990s. Drawing on the experiences of Irish citizens through a wide range …
Pelagianismus – eine konstruierte Häresie
Digital social work
While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts …
Social work and child protection for a post-pandemic world
The Covid-19 pandemic presented social workers and managers in child protection with complex practical and moral dilemmas about how to respond to children and families while social distancing. This paper draws on our research into practice during the pandemic to show some of the ways social workers changed their practice and to provide theories and concepts that can help to account for how such change occurs. Drawing on anthropological uses of th…
The Unheld Child
The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such…
Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman's Way, 1963-1973
This article explores discussions of family planning and the contraceptive pill in the popular Irish women's magazine Woman's Way between 1963 and 1973. Contraception was criminalised in Ireland in 1935 and literature relating to birth control was banned under the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The contraceptive pill was marketed as a cycle regulator from 1963 until legalization in 1979. This article outlines how women accessed the contrace…
Child Protection Social Work in Covid-19
This article brings together digital anthropology and social work scholarship to create an applied anthropology of everyday digital intimacy. Child protection social work involves home visits in the intimate spaces of others, where modes of sensorial and affective engagement combine with professional awareness and standards to constitute sensitive understandings of children’s well-being and family relationships. In the COVID-19 pandemic, social w…
Irishwomen United, the Contraception Action Programme and the feminist campaign for free, safe and legal contraception in Ireland, c. 1975–81
This article explores the contraception campaigns of Irishwomen United (I.W.U.) and their offshoot, the Contraception Action Programme (CAP), in the Republic of Ireland from 1975 to 1981. It draws on ten oral history interviews with former members of I.W.U. and CAP conducted by the author, in addition to feminist magazines, newspaper sources and the Roisin Conroy/Attic Press archive. For Irish feminists, the issue of class was paramount to their …
The context of coping
Coping with chronic illness encapsulates both practical and emotional aspects of living life in relation to one's long-term health condition(s). Dominant health psychology approaches for understanding coping, which underpin a more recent policy discourse on 'self-management', focus sharply on the person affected by illness and potentially mask the influence of overarching social structure. In this paper we draw on qualitative interviews with 48 p…
Veiled Warriors
The romantic image of the heroic First World War nurse is one which is familiar to all of us, not least to women's historians. This image has been popularised not only by wartime nurses themselves
The contribution of a history of heavy smoking to Scotland's mortality disadvantage
Scotland has a lower life expectancy than any country in Western Europe or North America, and this disadvantage is concentrated above age 50. According to the Human Mortality Database, life expectancy at age 50 has been lower in Scotland than in any other developed country since 1980. Relative to 15 developed countries that we have chosen for comparison, Scotland's life expectancy in 2009 at age 50 was lower by an average of 2.5 years for women a…
Importance of Relationship Context in HIV Transmission
We present results from life history interviews with 60 young adults from southern Uganda. Using a novel qualitative case-control design, we compared newly HIV-positive cases with HIV-negative controls matched on age, gender, marital status, and place of residence. Relationship context was the most salient theme differentiating cases from controls. Compared with HIV-negative respondents, recent seroconverters described relationships marked by poo…
Why Extending Measurements of 'Success' in Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes Matters for Social Work
Ever since domestic violence gained prominence on the social policy agenda, the focus of interventions has been on victims. A range of studies on social work/social welfare note the invisibility and/or lack of interventions aimed at domestic violence perpetrators. The exception has been perpetrator programmes (known in the USA as batterer intervention programmes, or BIPs), which increasingly receive referrals from social workers. However, there r…
You Have to do it for Yourself
Drawing on governmentality theories, accounts of the responsibilizing effects of policy and practice have dominated recent studies of youth justice in England and Wales. This article develops this debate by asking: what can it mean to claim that young offenders are responsibilized by contemporary modes of governing youth offending? An exposition of the dominant ways in which ‘responsibilization’ is conceptualized highlights the theoretical forecl…
The turning point in the whole struggle
In 1877, the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland made history by becoming the first institution in the United Kingdom to take advantage of the Enabling Act of 1876 and admit women to take its medical licences. However, in spite of the fact that the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland was crucial in the registration of early British women doctors in this period, there has, as yet, been little academic attention paid to …
Sports-Based Interventions and the Local Governance of Youth Crime and Antisocial Behavior
Drawing on analysis of youth crime and antisocial behavior reduction policies and a qualitative study of sports-based interventions (SBIs) in England, the article considers three ways in which SBI staff, managers, partners, and participants suggest projects contribute to youth crime reduction: encouraging young people's 'self-transformation' through the development of supportive and mentoring relationships (changing people), providing alternative…
Social inclusion’ through sports-based interventions
There is international enthusiasm for the idea that sport can contribute to ‘social inclusion’ strategies. Sport now features in various targeted youth initiatives, including ‘Positive Futures’: a ‘sport and activity based social inclusion programme’ currently operating in England and Wales. The processes through which these ‘sports-based interventions’ might promote ‘social inclusion’ require, however, further investigation. Drawing on interview…
Lesbian Body Image Perceptions
As are all women, lesbians are influenced by Western society's expectations of what a woman should look like. However, they are also influenced by the lesbian subculture. One of the author's aims was to explore how the sociocultural contexts in which lesbians belong influence their perceptions of body image. She purposively selected 20 lesbians and used constant comparative analysis to guide data collection and analyze the resulting transcribed i…
A woman's world
African women
Journal Article African women: a modern history Get access African women: a modern history. By Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1997. 308pp. Index. £44.50; ISBN0 813 32360 6. Pb.: £14.95; ISBN0 813 32361 4. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 73, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 789–790, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624490 Pub…
My Requiem, Myself
My Requiem, Myself Laura Kelly (bio) inspired by Allen Ginsberg and his poem “Death & Fame” At my funeral: Let no widows wail arias of grief. No distant relatives will hunch in the sodden overcoats of perfunctory sorrow, shifting on stern pews, and fretting about where they parked the Oldsmobile and how much longer is this going to take and what did she die of anyway? Let there be no mother draped over the casket, improvising the histrionics of l…
Poverty
Journal Article Poverty: a global review Get access Poverty: a global review. Edited by Else Øyen, S. M. Millerand Syed Abdus Samad. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. 1996. 621pp. Index. $59.50. ISBN 8 299 22649 2. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Page 819, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624177 Published: 01 October 199…
Social inclusion’ through sports-based interventions
There is international enthusiasm for the idea that sport can contribute to ‘social inclusion’ strategies. Sport now features in various targeted youth initiatives, including ‘Positive Futures’: a ‘sport and activity based social inclusion programme’ currently operating in England and Wales. The processes through which these ‘sports-based interventions’ might promote ‘social inclusion’ require, however, further investigation. Drawing on interview…
Sports-Based Interventions and the Local Governance of Youth Crime and Antisocial Behavior
Drawing on analysis of youth crime and antisocial behavior reduction policies and a qualitative study of sports-based interventions (SBIs) in England, the article considers three ways in which SBI staff, managers, partners, and participants suggest projects contribute to youth crime reduction: encouraging young people's 'self-transformation' through the development of supportive and mentoring relationships (changing people), providing alternative…
You Have to do it for Yourself
Drawing on governmentality theories, accounts of the responsibilizing effects of policy and practice have dominated recent studies of youth justice in England and Wales. This article develops this debate by asking: what can it mean to claim that young offenders are responsibilized by contemporary modes of governing youth offending? An exposition of the dominant ways in which ‘responsibilization’ is conceptualized highlights the theoretical forecl…
Why Extending Measurements of 'Success' in Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes Matters for Social Work
Ever since domestic violence gained prominence on the social policy agenda, the focus of interventions has been on victims. A range of studies on social work/social welfare note the invisibility and/or lack of interventions aimed at domestic violence perpetrators. The exception has been perpetrator programmes (known in the USA as batterer intervention programmes, or BIPs), which increasingly receive referrals from social workers. However, there r…
Lesbian Body Image Perceptions
As are all women, lesbians are influenced by Western society's expectations of what a woman should look like. However, they are also influenced by the lesbian subculture. One of the author's aims was to explore how the sociocultural contexts in which lesbians belong influence their perceptions of body image. She purposively selected 20 lesbians and used constant comparative analysis to guide data collection and analyze the resulting transcribed i…
Irishwomen United, the Contraception Action Programme and the feminist campaign for free, safe and legal contraception in Ireland, c. 1975–81
This article explores the contraception campaigns of Irishwomen United (I.W.U.) and their offshoot, the Contraception Action Programme (CAP), in the Republic of Ireland from 1975 to 1981. It draws on ten oral history interviews with former members of I.W.U. and CAP conducted by the author, in addition to feminist magazines, newspaper sources and the Roisin Conroy/Attic Press archive. For Irish feminists, the issue of class was paramount to their …
Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman's Way, 1963-1973
This article explores discussions of family planning and the contraceptive pill in the popular Irish women's magazine Woman's Way between 1963 and 1973. Contraception was criminalised in Ireland in 1935 and literature relating to birth control was banned under the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The contraceptive pill was marketed as a cycle regulator from 1963 until legalization in 1979. This article outlines how women accessed the contrace…
African women
Journal Article African women: a modern history Get access African women: a modern history. By Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1997. 308pp. Index. £44.50; ISBN0 813 32360 6. Pb.: £14.95; ISBN0 813 32361 4. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 73, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 789–790, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624490 Pub…
The Unheld Child
The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such…
The context of coping
Coping with chronic illness encapsulates both practical and emotional aspects of living life in relation to one's long-term health condition(s). Dominant health psychology approaches for understanding coping, which underpin a more recent policy discourse on 'self-management', focus sharply on the person affected by illness and potentially mask the influence of overarching social structure. In this paper we draw on qualitative interviews with 48 p…
In the cities of the South
Journal Article In the cities of the South: scenes from a developing world Get access In the cities of the South: scenes from a developing world. By Jeremy Seabrook. London: Verso. 1996. 303pp. Index. £44.95; ISBN 1 859 84986 5. Pb.: £13.95; ISBN 1 859 84081 7. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Page 818, https://doi.o…
Depo-Provera, Class, Race, and the Domiciliary Family Planning Services in Glasgow and Haringey, 1970–1983
In 1976, the Committee of Safety of Medicines (CSM) in Britain authorized the contraceptive injectable Depo-Provera (DP) for short-term use and for two main reasons only: if a woman had received a rubella vaccine or if her partner had just undergone a vasectomy. Although officially authorized on restricted grounds only, the drug appears to have been widely prescribed by doctors of the Domiciliary Family Planning Services (DFPS). This article take…
Importance of Relationship Context in HIV Transmission
We present results from life history interviews with 60 young adults from southern Uganda. Using a novel qualitative case-control design, we compared newly HIV-positive cases with HIV-negative controls matched on age, gender, marital status, and place of residence. Relationship context was the most salient theme differentiating cases from controls. Compared with HIV-negative respondents, recent seroconverters described relationships marked by poo…
Fit
World population
Journal Article World population: turning the tide. Three decades of progress and Population and development: old debates, new conclusions Get access World population: turning the tide. Three decades of progress. By Stanley P. Johnson. London: Graham & Trotman/Martinus Nijhoff, Norwell, MA. 1994. 387pp. Index. £65.00; ISBN 1 85966 046 0. Pb. £20.00; ISBN 1 85966 047 9.Population and development: old debates, new conclusions. By Robert Cassenand c…
Poverty
Journal Article Poverty: a global review Get access Poverty: a global review. Edited by Else Øyen, S. M. Millerand Syed Abdus Samad. Oslo: Scandinavian University Press. 1996. 621pp. Index. $59.50. ISBN 8 299 22649 2. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Page 819, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624177 Published: 01 October 199…
In the cities of the South
Journal Article In the cities of the South: scenes from a developing world Get access In the cities of the South: scenes from a developing world. By Jeremy Seabrook. London: Verso. 1996. 303pp. Index. £44.95; ISBN 1 859 84986 5. Pb.: £13.95; ISBN 1 859 84081 7. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 72, Issue 4, October 1996, Page 818, https://doi.o…
A woman's world
African women
Journal Article African women: a modern history Get access African women: a modern history. By Catherine Coquery-Vidrovitch. Boulder, CO, Oxford: Westview. 1997. 308pp. Index. £44.50; ISBN0 813 32360 6. Pb.: £14.95; ISBN0 813 32361 4. Laura Kelly Laura Kelly 1ACTIONAID Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 73, Issue 4, October 1997, Pages 789–790, https://doi.org/10.2307/2624490 Pub…
My Requiem, Myself
My Requiem, Myself Laura Kelly (bio) inspired by Allen Ginsberg and his poem “Death & Fame” At my funeral: Let no widows wail arias of grief. No distant relatives will hunch in the sodden overcoats of perfunctory sorrow, shifting on stern pews, and fretting about where they parked the Oldsmobile and how much longer is this going to take and what did she die of anyway? Let there be no mother draped over the casket, improvising the histrionics of l…
Lesbian Body Image Perceptions
As are all women, lesbians are influenced by Western society's expectations of what a woman should look like. However, they are also influenced by the lesbian subculture. One of the author's aims was to explore how the sociocultural contexts in which lesbians belong influence their perceptions of body image. She purposively selected 20 lesbians and used constant comparative analysis to guide data collection and analyze the resulting transcribed i…
Social inclusion’ through sports-based interventions
There is international enthusiasm for the idea that sport can contribute to ‘social inclusion’ strategies. Sport now features in various targeted youth initiatives, including ‘Positive Futures’: a ‘sport and activity based social inclusion programme’ currently operating in England and Wales. The processes through which these ‘sports-based interventions’ might promote ‘social inclusion’ require, however, further investigation. Drawing on interview…
Why Extending Measurements of 'Success' in Domestic Violence Perpetrator Programmes Matters for Social Work
Ever since domestic violence gained prominence on the social policy agenda, the focus of interventions has been on victims. A range of studies on social work/social welfare note the invisibility and/or lack of interventions aimed at domestic violence perpetrators. The exception has been perpetrator programmes (known in the USA as batterer intervention programmes, or BIPs), which increasingly receive referrals from social workers. However, there r…
You Have to do it for Yourself
Drawing on governmentality theories, accounts of the responsibilizing effects of policy and practice have dominated recent studies of youth justice in England and Wales. This article develops this debate by asking: what can it mean to claim that young offenders are responsibilized by contemporary modes of governing youth offending? An exposition of the dominant ways in which ‘responsibilization’ is conceptualized highlights the theoretical forecl…
The turning point in the whole struggle
In 1877, the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland made history by becoming the first institution in the United Kingdom to take advantage of the Enabling Act of 1876 and admit women to take its medical licences. However, in spite of the fact that the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland was crucial in the registration of early British women doctors in this period, there has, as yet, been little academic attention paid to …
Sports-Based Interventions and the Local Governance of Youth Crime and Antisocial Behavior
Drawing on analysis of youth crime and antisocial behavior reduction policies and a qualitative study of sports-based interventions (SBIs) in England, the article considers three ways in which SBI staff, managers, partners, and participants suggest projects contribute to youth crime reduction: encouraging young people's 'self-transformation' through the development of supportive and mentoring relationships (changing people), providing alternative…
Importance of Relationship Context in HIV Transmission
We present results from life history interviews with 60 young adults from southern Uganda. Using a novel qualitative case-control design, we compared newly HIV-positive cases with HIV-negative controls matched on age, gender, marital status, and place of residence. Relationship context was the most salient theme differentiating cases from controls. Compared with HIV-negative respondents, recent seroconverters described relationships marked by poo…
Veiled Warriors
The romantic image of the heroic First World War nurse is one which is familiar to all of us, not least to women's historians. This image has been popularised not only by wartime nurses themselves
The contribution of a history of heavy smoking to Scotland's mortality disadvantage
Scotland has a lower life expectancy than any country in Western Europe or North America, and this disadvantage is concentrated above age 50. According to the Human Mortality Database, life expectancy at age 50 has been lower in Scotland than in any other developed country since 1980. Relative to 15 developed countries that we have chosen for comparison, Scotland's life expectancy in 2009 at age 50 was lower by an average of 2.5 years for women a…
The context of coping
Coping with chronic illness encapsulates both practical and emotional aspects of living life in relation to one's long-term health condition(s). Dominant health psychology approaches for understanding coping, which underpin a more recent policy discourse on 'self-management', focus sharply on the person affected by illness and potentially mask the influence of overarching social structure. In this paper we draw on qualitative interviews with 48 p…
Irishwomen United, the Contraception Action Programme and the feminist campaign for free, safe and legal contraception in Ireland, c. 1975–81
This article explores the contraception campaigns of Irishwomen United (I.W.U.) and their offshoot, the Contraception Action Programme (CAP), in the Republic of Ireland from 1975 to 1981. It draws on ten oral history interviews with former members of I.W.U. and CAP conducted by the author, in addition to feminist magazines, newspaper sources and the Roisin Conroy/Attic Press archive. For Irish feminists, the issue of class was paramount to their …
Child Protection Social Work in Covid-19
This article brings together digital anthropology and social work scholarship to create an applied anthropology of everyday digital intimacy. Child protection social work involves home visits in the intimate spaces of others, where modes of sensorial and affective engagement combine with professional awareness and standards to constitute sensitive understandings of children’s well-being and family relationships. In the COVID-19 pandemic, social w…
Debates on family planning and the contraceptive pill in the Irish magazine Woman's Way, 1963-1973
This article explores discussions of family planning and the contraceptive pill in the popular Irish women's magazine Woman's Way between 1963 and 1973. Contraception was criminalised in Ireland in 1935 and literature relating to birth control was banned under the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. The contraceptive pill was marketed as a cycle regulator from 1963 until legalization in 1979. This article outlines how women accessed the contrace…
Digital social work
While the use of digital media and technologies has impacted social work for several years, the Covid-19 pandemic and need for physical distancing dramatically accelerated the systematic use of video calls and other digital practices to interact with service users. This article draws from our research into child protection to show how digital social work was used during the pandemic, critically analyse the policy responses, and make new concepts …
Social work and child protection for a post-pandemic world
The Covid-19 pandemic presented social workers and managers in child protection with complex practical and moral dilemmas about how to respond to children and families while social distancing. This paper draws on our research into practice during the pandemic to show some of the ways social workers changed their practice and to provide theories and concepts that can help to account for how such change occurs. Drawing on anthropological uses of th…
The Unheld Child
The COVID-19 pandemic changed dramatically the ways social workers engaged with children and families. This article presents findings from our research into the effects of COVID-19 on social work and child protection in England during the first nine months of the pandemic. Our aim is to provide new knowledge to enable realistic expectations of what it was possible for social workers to achieve and particularly the limits to child protection. Such…
Contraception and Modern Ireland
Contraception was the subject of intense controversy in twentieth-century Ireland. Banned in 1935 and stigmatised by the Catholic Church, it was the focus of some of the most polarised debates before and after its legalisation in 1979. This is the first comprehensive, dedicated history of contraception in Ireland from the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922 to the 1990s. Drawing on the experiences of Irish citizens through a wide range …
Pelagianismus – eine konstruierte Häresie
Political science (19 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Medicine (11 works) · History (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes (7 works) · Demography (6 works) · Irish and British Studies (6 works) · Population (6 works)