Moving midwifery beyond representation: what is and is not possible to do as a midwife in the NHS? / Charlotte McArdle (2022)

In this thesis entitled Moving Midwifery Beyond Representation: What is and is not possible to do as a midwife in the NHS? Informed by my practices as a midwife and as a dancer, I think about the “technocratic model of birth” and its technologies which shape the bodies of midwives and pregnant and birthing people, opening them to hierarchisation and constraint. I draw on Donna Haraway’s (2016) thinking about ways of knowing as historically situated systems, and Mel Y Chen’s (2012) work on animacy, to situate current midwifery practices in the NHS. I attempt to explain how the principles of animacy operate through the bodies of midwives, giving people more or less access to power within birthing systems. In doing so I take examples from an autobiography of Margaret Charles Smith (1996), a Black midwife working in Alabama in the 1900s, and of my own practice in hospital, in an antenatal clinic and at homebirths. I turn to Ann Cooper Albright (2019) and Randy Martin (2011) who think about dance as a socially engaged practice to situate my midwifery practice within my own body and its relation to others, and I draw on Pauline Oliveras (2005) and Salomé Voegelin (2021) to think about the types of listening that can be achieved through midwifery. Balancing midwifery with movement and sound practices I have explored other ways of knowing; holding a movement workshop with student midwives, sound recording in the studio while moving, remembering births and being open to poetry and fiction, playing with midwifery equipment as instruments, and taking midwives on sound walks. This balancing culminated in Tuning Out, an evening performance; a distorted guided meditation. To conclude, I suggest that, alongside measurable and quantifiable knowledge practices, there are other ways of knowing that are vital to a midwifery practice that has the potential to create improvised, and liberating ways of being together.