The Maternal Health Crisis and Everyday Life: Birth Care in Northern Uganda

The proposed talk is based on my book, Global Health and the Village: Transnational Contexts Governing Birth in Northern Uganda (2021). I explore the everyday experience of seeking care and managing pregnancy and birth in a remote, post-conflict setting with inadequate health care facilities. This leads to consideration of how culture and technical problems are framed in international health interventions.

My discussion of the transnational politics organizing maternity care and birth draws on the case of a gift to mothers of a “mama kit,” and couples’ HIV testing. I explore key concepts in the conversation on maternal health, such as access, preference, and culture. The offering of the mama kit, which contains materials needed by all new mothers but was only distributed to some, was shaped by discourses and practices of scarcity, responsibility, and deservingness. The kits were mobilized as a means of promoting the use of skilled delivery at birth, but in the absence of interventions that addressed the actual barriers to care, they instead created divisions between pregnant women and health care provision.

My work analyzes power in various dimensions: the impact of colonization on current social organization and health care systems, gendered power within intimate relationships particularly as it relates to health interventions, and north-south power relations as enacted in non-governmental and global health governance interventions. I will also discuss institutional ethnography in global south settings.