Ethnography in Progress - Anna Wynfield

October 23rd 11 am: PhD Candidate Anna Wynfield, Cultural Anthropology Hale 450 or Zoom Discussant: PhD Student Kelsey Armeni, Cultural Anthropology Affective Labor and the Social Reproduction of Certified Nurse-Midwifery Practice In this chapter, I explore how certified nurse-midwives integrate historically driven midwifery philosophies within gendered landscapes of care today. In its professional guidance, the certified nurse-midwifery profession seeks to alleviate medicalized and patriarchal obstetrical models by prioritizing patient autonomy, shared decision-making, and holistic forms of care during pregnancy. Even as certified nurse-midwives attempt to resist these trends in practice, however, they must do so within the constraints of a hierarchical healthcare system that consistently displaces the value of relational forms of care. As an advanced nursing profession subsumed within biomedical models, certified nurse-midwifery must also contend with gendered and racialized reverber...