Jocelyn Viterna

Research Interests: Gender, politics, law, health, social mobilization, reproductive justice, abortion criminalization, violence, Central America

Jocelyn Viterna is Professor of Sociology at Harvard University. Her research examines how social mobilization affects gender norms and practices in politics, in government institutions, in warfare, and in communities. Her current research investigates how anti-abortion activism in El Salvador has fundamentally transformed the Salvadoran judicial system, and more specifically, its processes for litigating gender. Viterna also examines how Salvadoran ob-gyns who care for pregnant women and fetuses in El Salvador negotiate the nation’s absolute abortion ban, and how these negotiations affect pregnancy health. Finally, Viterna is developing a book manuscript that situates the Salvadoran case in a broader regional and transnational context, asking what lessons we can learn from El Salvador about the the relationship between abortion laws and health, freedom, and democracy in the US and around the world.

Viterna’s work has been published in the American Journal of Sociology, the American Sociological Review, Politics and Gender, and the Latin American Research Review, among other journals. Her award-winning book, Women in War: The Micro-processes of Mobilization in El Salvador (2013, Oxford University Press) is currently being translated for publication in Spanish.