Embodied negotiations, practices and experiences interacting with pregnancy care infrastructures in South India

Bagalkot, Naveen and Akbar, Syeda Zainab and Sharma, Swati and Mackintosh, Nicola and Harrington, Deirdre and Griffiths, Paula and Noronha, Judith Angelitta and Verdezoto, Nervo; Barbosa, Simone and Lampe, Cliff and Appert, Caroline and Shamma, David A. and Drucker, Steven and Williamson, Julie and Yatani, Koji, eds. (2022) Embodied negotiations, practices and experiences interacting with pregnancy care infrastructures in South India. In: CHI 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings . Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), New York, N.Y.. ISBN 9781450391573 (https://doi.org/10.1145/3491102.3501950)

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Abstract

Behavior change and improving health literacy based on normative ideals of motherhood is a dominant paradigm to address maternal health challenges. However, these ideals often remove women's control over their bodies overlooking how the bodily experiences of pregnancy are socially and culturally constructed. We report on 27 interviews with pregnant women and nursing mothers in rural and semi-urban areas of South India, and six focus groups with 23 frontline health workers as secondary data. We explore how the embodied pregnancy experiences are influenced and negotiated by the socio-cultural context and existing care infrastructures. Our findings highlight how the ways of seeing, knowing, and caring for a body of a pregnant woman through often conflicting norms, beliefs and practices of medicine, nourishment and care actively shape the experiences of pregnancy. We open up a space for novel opportunities for digital health technologies to enhance women's embodied experiences and pregnancy care infrastructures in the Global South.

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