Delivering Health: Ethnographic Examinations of Reproductive Health in Mexico

Event details

Most births in Mexico take place with an obstetrician in a hospital, and nearly half of births there are done by cesarean section. However, midwives continue to attend to a small percentage of births nationwide, and are especially important providers in marginalized, indigenous and rural communities.

In this talk, Lydia Dixon will discuss her long-term ethnographic research with midwives in Mexico, which culminated in her 2020 book, Delivering Health: Midwifery and Development in Mexico. In it, she examines three very different approaches to Mexican midwifery training and draws connections between the goals of midwifery education leaders and the broader social, economic, and political contexts in which Mexican midwives work. She will then discuss how this project led into her current research on cesarean sections at Mexican hospitals. Themes of health access, obstetric violence, and authoritative knowledge emerge from both projects. Finally, Lydia will discuss the methodological challenges she has faced to shed light on the realities and creative possibilities inherent to qualitative research.

This is a hybrid event. Please contact Dr Emily Nicholls for the Zoom meeting details. 

About the speaker

Dr Lydia Dixon

Dr. Lydia Dixon is an Associate Professor of Health Science at California State University, Channel Islands, where she teaches on topics related to global health, community health, research methods, and bioethics. She received her PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests center around reproductive and community health in Mexico and the United States. This spring, she is embarking on a new research project studying online midwifery education in rural Scotland as a US-UK Fulbright Fellow with Edinburgh Napier University.