You are warmly invited to join our one-day symposium Shaping Knowledge in and of Reproductive Health. In the morning, we will have talks from Sreeparna Chattopadhyay (UA Ruhr, Manipal University), Caroline Meier zu Biesen (Athena Institute VU), and Rodante van der Waal (Universiteit voor Humanistiek, midwife). Annekatrin Skeide (Midwifery Sciences Charité Berlin) will act as a discussant. See below for the talk abstracts.

In the afternoon there will be an interactive workshop with contributions from Andie Thompson, Bregje de Kok, Annebel Huijboom, and Aishwarya Viswamitra. Please contact me if you would like to be a discussant for this session.

Abstracts

Methods in/of the body

• Sreeparna Chattopadhyay, Senior Research Fellow, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, UA Ruhr , Essen, Germany and Associate Professor, Manipal School of Law, Manipal University, India

The choice of methodologies, as much as the choice of subjects, is a political choice. This is especially salient when one’s site of research is the human body, which is never just a scientific object. Using four distinct but interrelated projects on gendering health,  I will demonstrate why we may come to prefer particular methodologies, the values they bring to a project, how these may be contested, and the empirical and ethical questions that may emerge. The first project involved a team-based 17-month-long fieldwork into maternal health (2015-2017) in northeastern India using anthropologically informed methods (Chattopadhyay et al, 2017; Chattopadhyay, 2018; Chattopadhyay and Jacob, 2020). The second uses methods drawn from digital humanities to examine discourses of respectful maternal care among women using private health care (Chattopadhyay, 2026). The third is an autoethnography of navigating health systems while suffering from chronic pelvic pain (Chattopadhyay, forthcoming). The fourth uses feminist and participatory methods [collaborative conversations, art-based body-mapping exercises, autoethnographies] to examine experiences of living with endometriosis in India, which simultaneously draws from the lived experiences of researchers and participants [ongoing]. I hope that these discussions will add to the already robust scholarship within medical anthropology and medical humanities on the politics of knowledge production around health, illness, and the body that demonstrate the mechanisms by which certain epistemologies and ontologies are privileged, while others are dismissed, enlarging the larger project of ensuring epistemic justice. 

Endometriosis and the gendered self: How autoethnography reframes coping with a contested disease

• Caroline Meier zu Biesen, Assistant Professor of Transdisciplinary Global Health at the Athena Institute, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

Endometriosis is a chronic disease defined by debilitating pain and multi-organ dysfunction. Yet, despite rising awareness, it remains medically and culturally contested. Drawing on academic research and personal experience, this talk explores the epistemological struggle of sufferers to have their pain validated.

I show that the pressure to mask symptoms behind a socially acceptable façade is deeply gendered and structurally embedded within healthcare. These expectations remain rooted in legacy framings of endometriosis as a “condition of the uterus”—carrying preconceptions that haunt contemporary practice. I argue that autoethnographic writing can reconstruct a narrative that addresses both the biographical disruption of illness and the self-blame woven into the patient experience. This reframing exposes how gendered biases shape the lived reality of chronic illness, transforming personal coping into a tool of epistemic and political weight. I contend that a situated, subjective perspective is essential to reconfigure personal experience and reshape how people identify and cope with the condition.

The Undercommons of Childbirth and Their Abolitionist Ethic of Care. A Study into Obstetric Violence Among Mothers, Midwives (in Training), and Doulas

• Rodante van der Waal

Engaging in dialogue with critical mothers, midwives, midwives in training, and doulas in the Netherlands, this study furthers the theoretical understanding of both obstetric violence and the activist resistance against it. Obstetric violence is understood as part of a process of relational separation, leaving the pregnant person isolated. The activist resistance against it is consequently theorized as the abolitionist building of an alternative "otherworld" of radical relational care. The themes established are: (1) "institutionalized separation" with the subtheme's "expropriation," "carcerality," and "obstetric violence;" and (2) "undercommoning childbirth" with subthemes "fugitive planning," "anarchic relationality," and "obstetric abolition."