Live Virtual Workshop- Anthropology of Birth with Robbie Davis-Floyd, PhD

Class 1 – Birth Across Cultures: An Evolutionary Perspective

This is week one of a six week course, participants can join at any time, recordings of previous weeks sessions are available in the course page.

Thursday, June 2, 2:00-4:00pm EDT

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This opening session offers an evolutionary perspective on the cultural treatment of human childbirth as a foundation. It’s focus is on bringing a postmodern mentality that incorporates scientific evidence with traditional and professional midwifery knowledge to our cultural understanding and management of birth. In this class you will:

• Learn birth practices across six human subsistence strategies
• Identify premodern similarities across vast cultural differences
• Examine the homogenizing effects of modernization
• Explore the possibilities of postmodern mentality for improving the technocratic treatment of birth
• Address the challenge of reincorporating traditional understandings of birth psychology

Robbie Davis-Floyd PhD, Adjunct Professor, Dept. of Anthropology, Rice University, and Fellow of the Society for Applied Anthropology, is a well-known medical anthropologist, international speaker and researcher in transformational models in childbirth, midwifery, obstetrics, and reproduction. She is author of over 80 journal articles and 24 encyclopedia articles, and of Birth as an American Rite of Passage (2003) and Ways of Knowing about Birth (2018); co-author of From Doctor to Healer: The Transformative Journey and The Power of Ritual (2016); and lead or co-editor of 15 volumes, the latest of which are Birth in Eight Cultures (2019); Birthing Models on the Human Rights Frontier: Speaking Truth to Power (2021); Sustainable Birth in Disruptive Times (2021); and the solo-edited Birthing Techno-Sapiens: Human-Technology Co-Evolution and the Future of Reproduction (2021). In process is a 3-volume anthology on The Anthropology of Obstetrics and Obstetricians: The Practice, Maintenance, and Reproduction of a Biomedical Profession, co-edited with perinatologist Ashish Premukar, and a co-edited Special Issue of Frontiers in Sociology on “The Global Impact of COVID-19 on Maternity Care Practices.”

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