Reproduction, Justice and Care: Listening in Philly

1 Course Unit

In this class, you will be introduced to reproductive justice as a holistic theory and a methodological framework that can guide the practice of medicine and anthropology. You will create an oral history with a Philly- based community activist, midwife, doula, or other practitioner whose work engages with reproductive justice, understood expansively as the right to have children, to not have children, and to parent children in healthy environments free from violence and state oppression. At the end of the class, we will release these oral histories together as part of a new season of CEE’s “Reckoning and Repair in Philadelphia” podcast. Recent reports in Philadelphia have called particular attention to the severity of the maternal health crisis in the city, where black birthing people are more than four times as likely to die of preventable causes than their white peers. Such inequalities are not unique or new; Philadelphia was a crucial site where medicine broadly and obstetrics more specifically were born... . Philadelphia is the first city in the United States to have an obstetric society, and it is also the educational home of the so-called father of gynecology, James Marion Sims, who notoriously experimented on enslaved women to develop foundational obstetric procedures still in use today. At the same time, Philadelphia has also been an activist stronghold, as a site of historical Black, Caribbean, Latinx, and immigrant organizing and community care for more than a century. Today, midwives, doulas, doctors, environmental justice workers and others continue to develope nurturing models of child, maternal, and familial care that uplift communities. Many of these have been informed by reproductive justice frameworks. Engaging with a long tradition of scholar-activist ethnography, we will turn to the experiences of these community organizers, birthworkers, midwives, and doulas to gain an understanding of their battles for reproductive justice in Philadelphia: from the persistent inequities in maternal medical care, to the community work to create safe neighborhoods, to patient rights education campaigns, to medical interventions within prisons. Working one-on-one with a partner engaged in this work, students will produce an oral history of reproductive justice in Philadelphia. In the process students will learn crucial methods of critical medical anthropology, and build their skills in ethnographic listening as both a research method and a potentially transformative act of care. It is open to students with all levels of experience, including those with no prior background in audio/media production Through your podcast episodes, you'll answer the following questions: 1. How have historical medical practices and medical cultures in Philadelphia, especially in the context of clinical obstetric care, shaped the current disparities and challenges in reproductive health? 2. What cultural, social, and economic factors have influenced the development of homegrown methods of care within Philadelphia's reproductive justice community, and what do these practices provide (or avoid) that hospital practices do not? 3. How do the experiences and perspectives of doula, reproductive justice workers, and health practitioners intersect with or challenge established medical paradigms? 4. What good does listening and documenting these stories of care and resistance in reproductive justice do, if anything, at the personal, social, and institutional level. This course offers a unique, hands-on, real-world experience, enabling you to develop collaborative, ethical, and engaged work that contributes to Philadelphia's reproductive justice community. Not Offered Every Year Mutually Exclusive: ANTH 6867 1 Course Unit