Laura Sochas is a Visiting Fellow at the III and a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the University of Oxford. Her research focuses on how power, institutions, and social policies affect health inequalities, using mixed methods. She takes a critical feminist stance, engaging with theories such as intersectionality and Reproductive Justice. Her work has been published in high-impact journals such as Social Science & Medicine, Demography, Socio-Economic Review, Health Policy & Planning, and BMJ Global Health.
Her Leverhulme-funded project is titled: “Policing Reproduction via Migration and Family Policies: Stress, Stigma & Health”. Through this research, she is exploring how migration and family policies in Europe affect parents’ rights to have children and to parent with dignity, and how this affects their health, formulating a quantitative approach to Reproductive Justice.
She has previously published on topics such as: collective bargaining and health inequalities; researching intersectionality using quantitative and mixed methods; modelling the indirect mortality effects of epidemics; how health service environments and health facility rules affect maternal health inequalities; how interviewers affect the likelihood of reporting an abortion.
Laura obtained her PhD in Demography from the Department of Social Policy at ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳ (2020). She holds an MSc in Social Research Methods (2016) and a Masters in Public Administration (2011) from ÐÓ°ÉÂÛ̳, as well as a BA in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (2007) from the University of Oxford. Prior to her PhD, she worked as a consultant on public health programmes in African and South Asian countries, for clients such as UKAID, the Gates Foundation, and UNFPA.
She is happy to be contacted in relation to the following topics: health inequalities; collective bargaining and trade unions; Reproductive Justice; maternal and reproductive health in the Global South.
Publications
Sochas, L. and Reeves, A. (2022) ‘Does Collective Bargaining Reduce Health Inequalities between Labour Market Insiders and Outsiders?’. Socio-Economic Review. September 2022.
Sochas, L. (2021) “Challenging categorical thinking: a mixed methods approach to explaining health inequalities”. Social Science and Medicine. July 2021.