Kathleen Fallon

Faculty Fellow, Faculty of Health

Faculty Fellow

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Kathleen M. Fallon is a professor and the undergraduate program director in the School of Global Health. Professor Fallon’s interests lie within political sociology, international development, and gender studies. Specifically, she focuses on women’s social movements, women’s political rights, women’s health, and democracy within sub-Saharan Africa, as well as across developing countries more broadly. As a Fulbright fellow, she completed field research in Ghana, examining the influence of democratization on women’s rights and the emergence of the women’s movement. Her mixed method approach resulted in the publication of Democracy and the Rise of Women’s Movements in Sub-Saharan Africa and additional journal publications.

She remains grateful to her “family,” friends, colleagues, and others in Ghana for their support of the project, as they were the ultimate creators of the research. Through comparative analyses across developing countries, and using both qualitative and quantitative methods, she has also examined: how types of democratic transitions influence women’s political representation, whether women’s legislative representation is linked to children’s health, if women’s activism contributes to the spread of women’s political quotas, the types of maternity leave policies that impact women’s fertility and child health outcomes, as well as what factors contribute to the passage of domestic violence laws in Ghana and across developing countries.

Professor Fallon is equally committed to teaching and mentoring students. She has received teaching awards within the Faculty of Arts and university wide at McGill University. She has also received the Dean’s Award for Excellence in Service by a Graduate Program Director at Stony Brook University. Her current research and teaching interests continue to examine how colonization contributes to existing societal inequalities and injustices and explores how to challenge and dismantle these inequalities and injustices.

Research keywords:

Global health; women’s rights; critical problem solving; colonial histories and decolonization

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