Date of Award

2026

Document Type

Honors Thesis (Open Access)

Department

Colby College. Global Studies Program

Advisor(s)

Britt Halvorson

Second Advisor

Sarah Duff

Abstract

This thesis examines the contemporary work of community-based Maine midwives through the theoretical framework of choreography. In the context of this work, choreography can be understood as the well-thought-out, purposeful undertaking of a process during which negotiation, coordination, and improvisation are required to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Using choreography, this thesis attempts to understand how Maine midwives navigate global market processes and practice under authoritative forms of biomedicine, ultimately linking them to other midwives across various global sites. Situated within Maine’s maternal health landscape that is characterized by the ongoing closure of labor and delivery units and rural hospitals, midwives engage in choreography as they confront rurality, health professional shortages, and issues of access. By drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a freestanding birth center in Midcoast, Maine, involving interviews with midwives and observations of their group clinical meetings, this thesis invokes their perspectives to illustrate ongoing debates over professionalization, choreography in its many forms, and the larger dynamics of the financialization of healthcare. This research finds that choreography is inherent to the making of medical spaces, the movement of midwives across systems and settings of care, and the creative ways midwives attend to the needs of diverse publics. This complex process that midwives undertake, becomes a dance to serve their patients while contending with legislative structures and biomedical systems they have little control over.

Keywords

midwifery, Maine, biomedicalization, reproduction, choreography, professionalization, coordination, biomedical and midwifery models of care, patient autonomy, informed decision-making, partnership

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