Professur für Zeitgeschichte Aktuelles

The international workshop seeks to develop nuanced, plural understandings of "progress" and "modernity" in regard to maternity in a global context by moving beyond their interpretation as Western-centric, future-oriented, top-down phenomena. In shifting attention away from obstetrics as a medical discipline as well as from physicians and medically trained midwives as the sole carriers of authoritative knowledge, the workshop seeks to foreground actors and discourses situated outside conventional medical and clinical settings. Which alternative imaginaries of "modern" pregnancy and childhood existed in the "long" twentieth century alongside the ones propagated by Western obstetrics? 

The workshop will take place at the University of Heidelberg on June 25 and 26. A keynote address on the 25 will be held by Nancy Rose Hunt (University of Florida).