governing and colonising migrant maternity

one of my most favourite people ever, ruth desouza, is giving a presentation next week. here are the details:

Dear friends

I am doing a presentation as part of the Department of Community Health Development lunchtime seminar series on Thursday 20th May from 12- 1pm in Room AB 217 at AUT Akoranga Campus. It is best to park at carpark 7 and walk over Map available here.

It's called Governing and colonising migrant maternity. The abstract is as follows:

The empirical study of migrant maternities offers a unique theoretical vantage point for considering wider issues such as imperialism, nation building and reproduction. Using the white settler context of Aotearoa/New Zealand, I detail an empirical study that explored the discourses used by well child health providers to represent their work with migrant mothers. I argue that migrant maternities are constituted through a repertoire of medical and nursing discourses combined with culturalist and assimilatory discourses that draw on liberal pluralist notions of citizenship. These require the migrant mother to take up normalising or colonising practices that enforce adaptation to dominant cultural norms such as autonomy and independence. These discursive practices or normalising strategies of power are colonising because they involve the re-ordering of space and the surveillance and control of mothers. Health professionals discipline and regulate gendered bodies in racialised ways that reinforce and reproduce colonial power relations and that this has the potential to contribute to health inequalities and ethically and socially unacceptable outcomes. Further development and refinement of cultural safety, an indigenous ethical form of nursing practice is advocated in order to counter dominant beliefs that racism can be ameliorated with moral education and greater cultural knowledge.

You are welcome to attend.
Ruth