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Dr Lula Mecinska

Former Research Student

Lula Mecinska

Research overview

My PhD research falls within the interdisciplinary field of breastfeeding studies, with focus on breastfeeding women's activism (lactivism). The PhD is based on in-depth inrerviews with breastfeeding women and participant observation of breastfeeding support groups. My main environment were grassroots and online groups in Poland and the UK, and the overlaps in interests and forms of action between these despite significant local differences. I am also interested in breastfeeding as an embodied practice - from questions about learning and skill to problems of conceptualisation and insufficiencies of discourses of breastfeeding promotion in attention to material realities. This connects with broader interests, which encompass women's rights in relation to reproduction, public health, and health social movements. I am currently developing a project on breastfeeding support for women in prisons, detention, and closed wards and working within a research group on enforced migration and reproductive justice.

Histories of discourses on breastfeeding - particularly within medicine and public health, informed by feminist critiques of medicalisation - are also an area of interest.

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