About

Jaimie Morse, PhD, MPH, is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, within the Social Sciences Division. Her research studies knowledge, technology, and policy in biomedicine and public health, with a particular focus on the interplay of law, health, and human rights in processes of policy change. Her current project examines the emergence of the sexual assault medical forensic exam, known as the 'rape kit,' as a tool of anti-rape activism in emergency medicine in the United States since the 1970s, and its adaptation for use with refugees and internally displaced persons. Prior to earning her PhD, Morse worked for ten years in the field of public health, both domestically and internationally. Her scholarly work has been supported by notable organizations including the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Social Science Research Council, and the Brocher Foundation. Her research interests encompass legal mobilization in medicine, global and transnational dimensions of medicine, technology, and law, science and technology studies, law and society, medical sociology, public policy and inequalities, qualitative methods, and global health justice. Morse has contributed to the academic field through publications on topics such as forensic nursing, humanitarian medicine, and the politics of health knowledge, and she is engaged in exploring how law, technology, and human rights intersect within medical and policy contexts.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Criminology
• Law
• Economics
• Advertising
• Business
• History
• Psychology
• Management

Selected publications

• Bodies of Evidence: A History of Rape Kit Protocols in US Emergency Nursing and Global Humanitarian Medicine

  2026-01-01

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Bodies of Evidence disrupts popular understandings of the rape kit by examining it as a complex assemblage of practices and protocols that stands at the uneasy nexus of law and medicine. Jaimie Morse traces how this assemblage was championed as a rights project in medicine, moving from the margins to the center of health care responses to sexual violence through new clinical standards of care, first in the United States and then in global humanitarian medicine. Drawing on archival research, interviews with experts and activists, and fieldwork at international meetings, the book chronicles a novel process of legal mobilization in medicine and interrogates the existential meanings and stakes of rape kits, their associated practices, and their underlying assumptions and expectations for survivors of sexual violence.

  PublisherDOI

• The politics of knowledge in health and biomedicine

  Edward Elgar Publishing eBooks · 2024-10-09

  book-chapter
  PublisherDOI

• Metrics, Legibility, and the Logics of Governance in Philanthropy and Humanitarian Aid

  Routledge eBooks · 2023 · 2 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Political Science
  • Business

  This chapter contributes to critical humanitarian and philanthropy studies through a consideration of metrics from a politics of knowledge perspective. Metrics have received growing attention in a number of domains—from economic development to global health, from human rights advocacy to emergency medical treatment at increasingly militarized borders. The chapter seeks to illustrate how insights drawn from social studies of measurement and the interdisciplinary field of science and technology studies (STS) can inform emerging scholarship at the intersection of critical humanitarian and philanthropy studies. To do so, it draws on exemplary texts on philanthropy and humanitarian intervention in several domains to argue that metrics not only define, but also sometimes limit, action through their constitutive role in problem definition and resource allocation. The chapter then demonstrates how metrics serve as indices of major shifts in development aid and global health governance.

  PublisherDOI

• “Legal exhaustion” and the crisis of human rights: Tracing legal mobilization against sexual violence and torture of Kurdish women in state custody in Turkey since the 1990s

  2023-03-30

  book-chapterSenior author

  Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kurdish women reported sexual violence in state custody during intense conflicts between the Turkish military and the guerrilla organization PKK. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with lawyers and activists in Turkey, we trace the development of legal mobilization by human rights lawyers and activists who characterized state-led sexual violence in the Kurdish region as a war crime against women and brought cases before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Inspired by the work of Kerem Altıparmak, we develop the concept of “legal exhaustion” to characterize the emotional and relational aspects of legal mobilization in the context of war and counterterrorism politics. Bringing together scholarship in sociolegal studies and critical approaches to human rights, we argue that legal exhaustion is productive—not just an unproductive and constraining state—prompting human rights lawyers to sustain legal mobilization in/outside courts and critique national and international laws.

  PublisherDOI

• “Legal exhaustion” and the crisis of human rights: Tracing legal mobilization against sexual violence and torture of Kurdish women in state custody in Turkey since the 1990s

  Journal of Human Rights · 2022 · 1 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Kurdish women reported sexual violence in state custody during intense conflicts between the Turkish military and the guerrilla organization PKK. Drawing on archival research and in-depth interviews with lawyers and activists in Turkey, we trace the development of legal mobilization by human rights lawyers and activists who characterized state-led sexual violence in the Kurdish region as a war crime against women and brought cases before domestic courts and the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Inspired by the work of Kerem Altıparmak, we develop the concept of “legal exhaustion” to characterize the emotional and relational aspects of legal mobilization in the context of war and counterterrorism politics. Bringing together scholarship in sociolegal studies and critical approaches to human rights, we argue that legal exhaustion is productive—not just an unproductive and constraining state—prompting human rights lawyers to sustain legal mobilization in/outside courts and critique national and international laws.

  PublisherDOI

• The Geopolitics of “Rape Kit” Protocols

  Osiris · 2021 · 5 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Sociology
  • Political Science
  • Criminology

  This article contributes to historiographies of forensic medicine by examining late twentieth-century women’s rights activism for new clinical standards on medical forensic exams for sexual assault (commonly known as “rape kits”). I argue that three features of these exams distinguish new standards of care from older practices in forensic medicine: the addition of specialized medical care to evidence-collection routines; attention to psychological trauma; and the creation of specific protocols to standardize, professionalize, and guide routine administration of the exam. To illustrate this shift, I follow “rape kit” protocols that emerged within nursing in the United States beginning in the 1970s, to their uptake and codification in international guidelines, to more recent attempts to adapt them for use in conflict zones. New clinical guidelines transformed the “rape kit” into an assemblage of instruments, medical routines, and new ways of thinking about sexual assault. The rape kit assemblage simultaneously became a traveling technology of care and a technology of governance and law. In practice, however, as new standards were implemented more widely, tensions between medical care and evidence collection emerged. At the intersection of law and medicine, distinct logics and assumptions came together, positioning not only medical and legal professionals, but also patients, in the unenviable liminal zone in which care and justice met and produced friction. This comes across clearly from an analysis of their use in the eastern region of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where mass rape had taken place. In this context, political turmoil and war conditioned the delivery of health care and, by extension, the liminal zone between medicine and law that standards for post-rape care occupy. Investigations of mass rape threatened to contravene confidentiality of medical records and expose health workers and patients to retaliation from suspects, renewing controversies surrounding the feasibility of aligning the institutional logics of medicine and law in this way.

  PublisherDOI

• Legal mobilization in medicine: Nurses, rape kits, and the emergence of forensic nursing in the United States since the 1970s

  Social Science & Medicine · 2018-12-24 · 40 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Book review: Sameena Mulla, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention

  Theoretical Criminology · 2016-05-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Colonizing the Clinic: The Adventures of Law in HIV Treatment and Research

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2016-02-29 · 11 citations

  book-chapterSenior author

  Sociolegal scholars have been sensitive to the variety of ways that law in action differs from law on the books. Gaps between the two are especially likely to arise when law moves across boundaries. This chapter looks at the use of law in HIV clinics (in the United States, South Africa, Thailand, and Uganda) that are involved in both treatment and research. In this case, law moves simultaneously across two boundaries when it is transported from legal arenas to medical settings and from the global North to the global South. Because the (new) legal forms are arriving in settings that already have rules, guidelines, and norms, the process of importation is quite complex. Moreover, medical conventions about how to work with rules are different than lawyerly ways of using rules, necessitating further adjustments.

  PublisherDOI

• Law, Sociology of

  Elsevier eBooks · 2015-01-01

  book-chapterSenior author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Carol A. Heimer

  American Bar Foundation

  4 shared

• Nisa Göksel

  2 shared

• John Elvis Hagan

  University of Cape Coast

  2 shared

• Martin Green

  1 shared

• John Cheever

  1 shared

• Kingsley Amis

  1 shared

• Bill McCarthy

  Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

  1 shared

• Sybille Bedford

  1 shared

Education

• PhD, Sociology

  Northwestern University

  2018

• MPH, Community Health Sciences, UCLA School of Public Health

  University of California, Los Angeles

  2006

• BA, Political Science and Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1998

Awards & honors

• National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) Faculty Award (2…
• Best Scholarly Article Award, ASA Section on Human Rights (2…
• David Edge Prize for best peer-reviewed article or book chap…
• UCSC Hellman Fellowship (2021)
• Charlotte W. Newcombe Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship (2016…