UK
She/Her
2021 Cohort
Rhiana is an experienced researcher working in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) with a background in Anthropology. Her work at a digital SRH service sees her evaluating how the design of digital SRH services navigate peoples understanding of their health, health care and digital materialities.
100 Stories of Pleasure 
Rhiana is an experienced researcher working in sexual and reproductive health (SRH) with a background in Anthropology. Her work at a digital SRH service sees her evaluating how the design of digital SRH services navigate peoples understanding of their health, health care and digital materialities. She also works to understand how pleasure can impact SRH and wellbeing. Particularly, how a pleasure approach can be implemented pragmatically, in a variety of settings and groups, and how pleasure may impact contraceptive practices. She is interested in the mechanisms that underpin a pleasure approach and why it works to improve SRH and wellbeing outcomes. As part of the Pleasure Fellow scheme, Rhiana co-founded and ran a successful Instagram campaign that crowd-sourced stories of pleasure to create a digital library of pleasure, desire and sensation. Find the Instagram page here @100storiesofpleasure.
During the Pleasure Fellowship, Rhiana worked along Ipsita and Leeza on a project called ‘100 Stories of Pleasure’. Through their work, they compiled very diverse and sexy stories from all over the world around pleasure. Ipsita remains engaged to The Pleasure Project through different activities. She has recently lead the documentation of lessons, learnings and evidence of the partnership between The Pleasure Project and Amplify Change. She was also involved in the systematic review and meta analysis research conducted by The Pleasure Project and the World Health Organization (WHO).
Rhiana is currently working as a research associate at SH:24 on how people experience digital sexual and reproductive health care. She’s also working on evaluating how the design of new digital sexual and reproductive health services navigate people’s understanding of their health, health care and digital materialities. Some of her recent research has focused on: online delivery and training of self-injectable contraception, chatbots for sexual and reproductive health care and online Hepatitis C testing.
Highlights
100 Stories of Pleasure is from a desire to undo the silencing that stifles discussion on pleasure and bring about sex positive, joyful discussions on pleasure.
In most cultures and societies today, we are taught from a young age that to talk about sex and pleasure is uncomfortable, uncivilized, unladylike, unacceptable – the list goes on. When we do talk about sex, at school, at home, or in a health care setting, we often receive the message that sex is dangerous, that you will get an STI or fall pregnant... and you will die (quote Coach Car from Mean Girls)! Why are we never told how pleasurable sex can be! 100 Stories of Pleasure aims to collect and curate a digital anthology of pleasure positive stories from 100 pleasure enthusiasts around the world!
“Overall I had a great time. It was really helpful and wonderful to be a part of the scheme and connect with people from around the world who are also interested in pleasure positive sexual health. I enjoyed the chance to discuss pleasure openly with the other fellows. Anne, Francesca and Arushi, were wells of knowledge! So it was great to have access to that. I really appreciated having The Pleasure Project's coaching and guidance around the projects we went on to implement. That really helped me to shape my projects aims and make it more manageable”
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