I am part of Kone Foundation funded research project Battles over Birth. The project focuses on the embodied experience, the question of agency, and relationality, including negotiations and tensions between the women and the institutional orders in action. The study asks how the embodied birth experience and the woman’s agency emerge in relations with other actors, materials and technologies, and how the professional practices and the culture of care contribute. We analyze togetherness among the woman, her partner, and professionals as a relational accomplishment, and anchor it to an understanding of professional rationales, organizational protocols and fine-tuned power structures of society.

Research team: docent Kaisa Kuurne, Ph.D. Anna Leppo, doctoral candidate Johanna Sarlio-Nieminen and professor Barbara Katz Rothman.