BIRTHING AND REFUSAL

MARCH 18th at NOON

March's Third Thursday event, Birthing and Refusal, featured the work of our post-doc fellow Alissa Jordan in conversation with Carmelle Moïse, a nurse-midwife and board member at The NGO MamaBaby Haiti. Alissa introduced us to her work in embodiment, healing, and resistance in Haiti, highlighting post-partum care and birthing practices in Haitian Vodou. The conversation contextualized mothers, families, and other patients encounters (and avoidances) of medical care in NGO and mission hospitals that act as debtors prisons, and featured lively discussion with attendees  Carmelle implored attendees to take the time to listen to mothers and families in their own words, describing how empathetic listening can break down common assumptions about care, debt, and the stark maternal health statistics in Haiti. The conversation also introduced the work-in-progress, "Lòpital Pa Prizon" a patient-centered, audio-visual archive of hospital detention in Haiti, which is an ongoing collaboration between Alissa Jordan, Carmelle Moïse, and Jean-Denis Aureleus of ADEF (Asosyasyon de Dwa Enfant ak Fanm).


Listen to the presentation and lively discussion now!

Alissa JORDAN

Alissa Jordan is a multimodal cultural anthropologist who received her Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Florida. Her research focuses on questions of bodily being, bodily security, and creativity across field sites in rural Haiti, urban Ghana, and in social spaces in virtual and augmented reality. She investigates these questions using methods of experimental writing, collaborative nonlinear filmmaking, sensory mapping, photography, museum exhibition, and digital experimentations. She is currently researching women's experiences of birthing, and care as resistance, in the context of hospitals that imprison mothers, infants, and other patients for debt.
She produced the audio documentary "Birthing and Resistance" on hospital detention in Haiti, with the first episode co-hosted with photo-journalist and birth activist China Tolliver, and she is the host of "Akouchman ak Rezistans", a Haitian Creole audio documentary on hospital detention.
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CARMELLE MOISE

Carmelle Moise is a nurse midwife and a member of the board at MamaBaby Haiti MamaBaby Haiti is a non-profit which runs two birth centers, health clinics, and a midwifery school in Haiti. It provides a safe place for Haitian women to receive compassionate and respectful care at the hands of skilled midwives. No one is turned away.

MICHEL (TRANSLATOR)

Michel Pierre Saint Phard is an English Teacher from Arcahaie, Haiti studying to be a Medical Assistant in Westbury, New York. In his life, Saint Phard has farmed a plantain garden, ran into a deadly fire to save the lives of fellow workers, worked in numerous NGOs, and (like many Haitians) helped pull people from the wreckage of the 2010 earthquake when foreign workers and US military were boarded up in an airport fortress downtown.

​In 2014, he was an invited speaker at the University of Florida for his talk "Why YOU Need US," a conversation on America and Aid Projects in Haiti. He has worked on research projects related to anthropology and medicine with Alissa Jordan since 2012.