Welcome

You might have heard of the sociologist Barbara Katz Rothman. She says:

“Birth is not only about making babies. birth is about making mothers[/parents]...strong, competent, capable mothers who trust themselves and know their inner strength.”

This also applies to you as a student, just replace ‘mother’ or ‘parent’ with ‘midwife’. And I’d argue that this also applies to academic work. The grade isn’t the important thing, it’s the time you spend working on a project and trying to come to conclusions about the problems we face in midwifery. I will definitely be sharing ideas to you get through an essay faster and get a better grade, because you do have job to do. But overall I want to normalise the struggle as this feeling is just the hard work of applying yourself to a worthy question. This means you can come at your assignment from a place of integrity.

A note about the content of this course:

Big thanks to all the students who took part in the original seminar and let me record what we talked about. Videos have been edited due to the zoom call to protect some students’ anonymity.