Politics And Narratives Of Birth

Bodies that Birth puts birthing bodies at the centre of questions about contemporary birth politics, power, and agency. Arguing that the fleshy and embodied aspects of birth have been largely silenced in social science scholarship, Rachelle Chadwick uses an array of birth stories, from diverse race-class demographics, to explore the narrative entanglements between flesh, power, and sociomateriality in relation to birth. Adopting a unique theoretical framework incorporating new materialism, feminist theory, and a Foucauldian ‘analytics of power’, the book aims to trace and trouble taken-for-granted assumptions about birthing bodies. Through a diffractive and dialogical approach, the analysis highlights the interplay between corporeality, power, and ideologies in the making of birth narratives across a range of intersectional differences. The book shows that there is no singular birthing body apart from sociomaterial relations of power. Instead, birthing bodies are uncertain zones or unpredictable assortments of physiology, flesh, sociomateriality, discourse, and affective flows. At the same time, birthing bodies are located within intra-acting fields of power relations, including biomedicine, racialized patriarchy, socioeconomics, and geopolitics. Bodies that Birth brings the voices of women from different sociomaterial positions into conversation. Ultimately, the book explores how attending to birthing bodies can vitalize global birth politics by listening to what matters to women in relation to birth. This is fascinating reading for researchers, academics, and students from across the social sciences.

This is a book for midwives and health professionals but it is one which starts from women's stories and their points of view. Pointers to best practice are presented alongside the narratives, making this a practical read for those concerned with making home birth a real option for women.

This book uses gendered stories of displacement and re-settlement to interrogate our understanding of social suffering and justice. Parin Dossa, an anthropologist, argues that systemic inequity and exclusionary practices impact the health and well-being of marginalised people. Using narrative accounts of Canadian Iranian women, this book links individual experiences of migration to social and political factors. Dossa challenges conventional thinking that interprets social suffering in terms of personal stake and individual accountability. She questions the ways in which radicalised and gendered inequality in Canada are perceived as cultural differences instead of social oppression. Yet this book is far from a laundry list of social determinants of migration and health. Dossa's illustrative stories are linked to a poetics of migration that shows the remaking of a world with a more informed sense of social justice. A pioneering study on migration and storytelling, this book is an important contribution to medical anthropology, migration and gender studies.

Broken Narrative provides an extensive reflection on history, politics, and contemporary art, revolving around the cornerstones of the artistic practice of Albanian artist Armando Lulaj. The core of the book is formed by and extended interview of Lulaj by Italian artist and writer Marco Mazzi. This inquiry starts in the year 1997, a year of social and political upheaval in Albania, of anarchy, controversies and emigration, of toxic seeds of neoliberalism sprouting in an already wounded country, and continues to the present day, where politics, hidden behind art forms, has practically destroyed (again) every different and possible future of the country. This book also sketches out a connection between the recent Albanian political context and contemporary art by considering the realities of Albania as essential for an understanding of the dynamics of international power in contemporary art and architecture, and the role of politics therein. Broken Narrative comes in a bilingual English-Japanese edition, in part as homage to the subtle esthetics of Japanese poetry, which has inspired many of the Lulaj's works, while equally evoking the subversive films of the Red Army, active in Japan at the turn of the 1960s and '70s. Broken Narrative contains a double preface in English by Albanian scholar Jonida Gashi and in Japanese by photographer Osamu Kanemura. Armando Lulaj was born in Tirana in 1980. He is a writer of plays, texts on risk territories, filmmaker, and producer of conflict images. He's research is orientated towards accentuating the border between economical power, fictional democracy, and social disparity in a global context. His main topics of interest remain power, corruption and institutional critique. Lulaj has participated in many international exhibitions and film festivals. His works are part of various important private and public collections. Armando Lulaj is one of the founders of DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art. Marco Mazzi (1980) is an Italian photographer and writer living and working between Florence, Tokyo, and Tirana. Mazzi studied Contemporary Literature at the University of Florence and has also studied Japanese avant-garde art and visual poetry in Japan. In 2008, Mazzi founded the non-profit organization Relational Cinema Association within the University of Waseda in Tokyo. Mazzi was photographer-in-residence at The Department of Eagles (Tirana, Albania) during the conference Pedagogies of Disaster and for the project Lapidari, and he was the stage and still photographer for Armando Lulaj's Recapitulation (2015), commissioned by the 2015 Venice Biennale' s Albanian Pavilion.

What are the political dimensions that are revealed in women’s preferences for health care during pregnancy and childbirth? The answers to this question vary from one community to the next, and often from woman to the next, although the trends in the Global North and South are strikingly different. Employing three conceptual frames; medicalization, the public-private distinction, and intersectionality, Candace Johnson examines these differences through the narratives of women in Canada, the United States, Cuba, and Honduras. In Canada and the United States, women from privileged and marginalized social groups demonstrate the differences across the North-South divide, and women in Cuba and Honduras speak to the realities of severely constrained decision-making in developing countries. Each case study includes narratives drawn from in-depth interviews with women who were pregnant or who had recently had children. Johnson argues that women’s expressed preferences in different contexts reveal important details about the inequality that they experience in that context, in addition to as various elements of identity. Both inequality and identity are affected by the ways in which women experience the division between public and private lives – the life of the community and the life of the home and family – as well as the consequences of intersectionality – the combinations of various sources of disadvantage and women’s reactions to these, either in the form of resistance or compliance. The rigorous and highly original cross cultural and comparative research on health, gender, poverty and social context makes Maternal Transition an excellent contribution to global maternal health policy debates.

This book brings together multidisciplinary perspectives to explore how political values and acts of resistance impact the delivery of social justice in post-colonial states. Everyday life in post-colonial states, such as South Africa and Zimbabwe, is characterized by injustices that have both a historical and contemporary nature. From fishers in Cape Town accused of poaching, to residents of Bulawayo demanding access to water, this book focuses on the relationship between the state and groups that have been historically oppressed due to being on the margins of the political, economic and social system. It draws on empirical research from 12 scholars looking at cases in Brazil, India, South Africa and Zimbabwe. Chapters explore questions such as what citizens, especially those from marginalized groups, want from the state. The book looks at the political values of citizens and how these are formed in the process of engaging with the state and through everyday injustices. It also asks why and how citizens resist the state, with examples of protest, as well as less visible forms of resistance reflecting complex histories and power relations. Finally, the book explores how narratives and counter-narratives reveal the nature of political values and perceptions of what is just. Taken together these elements show the evolution of post-colonial social contracts. Examining important themes in political science, anthropology, sociology and urban geography, this book will appeal to scholars and students interested in political values, justice, social movements and resistance.

This book presents a psychological analysis of identity development among Israeli and Palestinian youth, developing an argument about the mutual constitution of culture and mind through narrative, as well as a compelling critique of traditional approaches to intervention with youth to promote peace and coexistence.

Usually conceived in opposition to each other – birth as a hopeful beginning, death as an ending – this book brings them into dialogue with each other to argue that both are central to our experiences of being in the world and part of living. Written by two authors, this book takes an intergenerational approach to highlight the connections and disconnections between birth and death; adopting a relational approach allows the book to explore birth and death through the key relationships that constitute them: personal and social, private and public, the affective and social norms, the actual and the virtual and the ordinary and profound. Of interest to academics and students in the fields of feminism, phenomenology and the life course, the book will also be of relevance to policy makers in the areas of birth activism and end of life care. Drawing from personal stories, everyday life and publicly contested examples, the book will also be of interest to a more general readership as it engages with questions we all at some point will grapple with.