Letter from the Editors:

Dear Readers,

Welcome to the Flow! We are so excited to share this project with you. Our team has been working tirelessly over the past couple semesters to connect you with a platform to read, share, and ponder reproductive health. Reproductive health is a universal domain, it is connected to the way we conduct our lives, and the care that we give to ourselves. Our experiences, too, with reproductive health, if you realize it now or not, can also be universal. We hope that the Flow will ultimately become a place for you to see that and share your own experiences. 

Through the Academic Journal, we wish to start by providing summaries on the pertinent novel and general research that has been conducted in the space of reproductive health, global health, and policy. As you’ll see here, we have articles spanning novel male contraceptive initiatives, the landscape of maternal morbidity across the globe, to the impact of telemedicine in the COVID-19 era on reproductive health visits. The Academic Journal serves as a lens into the variety of domains that reproductive health spans, from global health to clinical research, to social science research, to even the research coming out of Duke University. This way, regardless of whatever academic domain piques your interest, you’ll find something of interest here at the Flow. Research can be a daunting word and the readings can be lengthy, but here we’re hoping to demystify the realm of academic research and make it more accessible for students across a wide variety of domains.  

The Flow Magazine is the more artistic counterpart to the Academic Journal. This largely stems from our own experiences with reproductive health. Over the course of our time at Duke and beyond, we have gained insight into how art, creativity, cultural analysis, writing, and film, can highlight the beauty and the reality of reproductive health complementarity to traditional research. These mediums beg for our attention and can highlight the beauty or anxiety or terrifying experiences of reproductive health in a way that research may not be able to capture. It also lends itself to a more elastic interpretation and representation for those who wish to relay their own experiences in reproductive health. This can be a home for those who may not find one in academic research, a home for those caught in the worlds in between research and artistry, or those who master both. We ultimately wish to provide you with a whole host of perspectives that may not be seen in mainstream discourse. 

Here at the Flow, we hope you will find something you love, something you may not love, something you may want to get more interested in, and something you may share with others. Through our continued stream of articles that will be updated on this website, we hope to broaden each of our perspectives of what reproductive health means, and find the definition, resources, and stories that work best for you. 

Thank you for all your continued support. 

Kindly,

Keri Tomechko and Ashka Shah, Editors-in-Chief.