Please see our attached CFP for the AAA meeting, and forward to any interested in midwifery that might like to submit an abstract.

Thanks!

Lydia Zacher Dixon

CFP for Panel on Midwifery

 

Revisiting Midwifery: New Approaches to an Old Profession

 

Midwives are often portrayed in popular media as passive, romanticized remnants of a vanishing, pre-modern past, whose knowledge and practices stand in contrast to biomedicine – and, by extension, to modernity. Recent scholarship in anthropology has challenged such representations, illustrating through specific global case studies the multiple ways in which midwives are agential and strategic as they demarcate space within shifting social, political and economic landscapes. Further, midwifery has been shown to traverse and critically reimagine boundaries between biomedicine and its alternatives. Bourgeault et al. have referred to the scholarship on “new midwifery” of recent decades, which “denotes a critical shift in thinking and action by midwives, birthing women, and sympathetic supporters in regard to the significance of midwifery for the health and well-being of mothers and infants” (2004:3). By examining what midwives do and know, and how they learn and practice, complex entanglements between the local and global, past and future, biomedical and traditional, and developed and undeveloped take on new meaning.

 

We invite papers that explore “new midwifery” from multiple angles, through such questions as: How are midwives reacting to, reshaping or resisting the biomedical reach in new or surprising ways? What are the emerging barriers facing midwives, and what are the emerging possibilities? How are midwifery knowledge and practice being spread and changed through new spatial or political flows? How are new methods, theories, or subjectivities (re)produced by midwives?

 

Guidelines for Submissions

We invite papers that challenge assumptions about midwifery today, and that engage with diverse theoretical and methodological approaches to ethnographic research. Please submit your 250- word abstract (as a Word Doc or PDF) to Vania Smith-Oka (Notre Dame), [log in to unmask], or Lydia Zacher Dixon (UC Irvine), [log in to unmask], by April 5. We look forward to reading your submissions!