Anthropology

2/8/2018—4 pm—404 GRI—Adrienne Strong
“Bureaucratic Proliferation, Surveillance, and Care Practices: The Partograph as Technology and Bureaucratic Document”
The partograph, graphical representation of a pregnant woman’s labor, is a simple technology meant to help healthcare providers detect serious problems for the mother or her baby before she gives birth. Despite its presence in many low resource settings, providers often do not use it in the ways in which technical experts and policy makers imagine. Insight from the producers of these global/local documents contributes to understanding how local actors produce new meanings in a system that does not consider their productive capabilities, which, ultimately, transform the document’s original meanings.
Dr. Adrienne Strong received a joint Ph.D. in 2017 from Washington University in St. Louis and the University of Amsterdam. Her dissertation work was one of the first ethnographic explorations of maternal mortality from the perspective of healthcare workers and administrators. She is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Averting Maternal Death and Disability program at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. On this grant she is currently conducting fieldwork on a second project about birth companion programs in Tanzania. She has received funding from Fulbright, Fulbright-Hays, a P.E.O. Scholar Award, and three NSF grants.