#doulastudies

[stevelandmawillimorris]

What it means to "hold space" for people, plus eight tips on how to do it well - Heather Plett

Some of my best lessons in what it means to hold space for people came from a palliative care nurse.

[killingstonewisdom]

MS 0036

.just keeping track of the things i'm tryna get into.this one's from the Washington Historical Society.

"Collection consists of Busey’s published remarks and a collection of pamphlets related to his involvement in the American Party (Know Nothings) in the mid-1850s; a number of Busey’s writings on obstetrics, gynecology, and public health issues from the 1870s-1890s; a few pieces of correspondence; and two volumes related to his graduation from St. Mary’s Seminary. The first volume is entitled ”Diploma and Correspondence” and contains original letter conferring degree, his letter to the school, and congratulatory notes. The second volume has imprinted on its cover ”Samuel C. Busey, M.D., LL.D.” and contains typed versions of all the handwritten correspondence in 'Diploma and Correspondence'.”

[killingstonewisdom]

"Relying on archival research in England and Belgium, as well as fieldwork in the Congo, Hunt reconstructs an ethnographic history of a remote British Baptist mission struggling to survive under the successive regimes of King Leopold II’s Congo Free State, the hyper-hygienic, pronatalist Belgian Congo, and Mobutu’s Zaire. After exploring the roots of social reproduction in rituals of manhood, she shows how the arrival of the fast and modern ushered in novel productions of gender, seen equally in the forced labor of road construction and the medicalization of childbirth. Hunt focuses on a specifically interwar modernity, where the speed of airplanes and bicycles correlated with a new, mobile medicine aimed at curbing epidemics and enumerating colonial subjects. Fascinating stories about imperial masculinities, Christmas rituals, evangelical humor, colonial terror, and European cannibalism demonstrate that everyday life in the mission, on plantations, and under a strongly Catholic colonial state was never quite what it seemed. In a world where everyone was living in translation, privileged access to new objects and technologies allowed a class of “colonial middle figures”—particularly teachers, nurses, and midwives—to mediate the evolving hybridity of Congolese society. Successfully blurring conventional distinctions between precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial situations, Hunt moves on to discuss the unexpected presence of colonial fragments in the vibrant world of today’s postcolonial Africa."

[killingstonewisdom]

All the prejudices and failures in a society can be magnified during an important life event. This is nowhere more clear than during pregnancy and birth.

Rivka Cymbalist in Radical Doula Profile

[killingstonewisdom]

In short, the current Eighth Amendment conditions of confinement jurisprudence is unable to contest the racial and gender stereotypes of female prisoners that render them vulnerable to shackling practices. Nor is the current doctrinal framework able to recognize the historical role of prisons in regulating the reproductive autonomy of women, particularly Black women, and the role of such control in maintaining racial subordination and hierarchy. Cases that have considered the constitutionality of shackling practices, such as Nelson v. Correctional Medical Services and Brawley v. Washington bear out this point. In both cases, the doctrinal framework for "cruel and unusual punishments," which is narrowly focused on individual actors rather than institutions, functions to obscure race and ignores historical antecedents to contemporary shackling practices.

Priscilla A. Ocen, Punishing Pregnancy: Race, Incarceration, and the Shackling of Pregnant Prisoners