DPhil Student
Linacre College
Research keywords: childbirth, home births, empowerment, sensory experience
Research interests: I am broadly interested in reproduction and childbirth, and in particular on how these are experienced and lived by women. I have previously done research on negative experiences of hospital births in the UK, and I have worked with ‘birth narratives’ to tease out the ways in which different participants in the birth event develop and enact ‘ways of knowing about birth’. I have drawn from recent trends in the anthropology of care and in the anthropology of ethics and morality to show how clinical and medical encounters contain the possibility for both suffering and hope.
I am currently working on births at home in the UK and Denmark, with a particular focus on sensory experiences. I am exploring the idea that knowledge, techniques and power flow between those who participate in home births by way of collaborative and sensorial networks.
Email: gaia.ardizzone@linacre.ox.ac.uk
