Friday October 16th from 9:30 am to 1:30 pm

Do you want a space to write in community? Are you feeling stuck or alone in the writing process? Join us in person and over zoom to write together over four hours as we 'sprint' towards finishing our current works. Come with your dissertation chapter, MA paper, job applications, conference paper, academic article, or whatever else you are working on! You may come and go as you please.

Snacks, coffee, and tea will be served courtesy of the CU Anthropology department.

In person in Hale 450 or by zoom.

RSVP to kelsey.armeni@colorado.edu

for the zoom link.

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Hale 450 or Zoom

Discussant: PhD Student Kelsey Armeni, Cultural Anthropology

Affective Labor and the Social Reproduction of Certified Nurse-Midwifery Practice

In this chapter, I explore how certified nurse-midwives integrate historically driven midwifery philosophies within gendered landscapes of care today. In its professional guidance, the certified nurse-midwifery profession seeks to alleviate medicalized and patriarchal obstetrical models by prioritizing patient autonomy, shared decision-making, and holistic forms of care during pregnancy. Even as certified nurse-midwives attempt to resist these trends in practice, however, they must do so within the constraints of a hierarchical healthcare system that consistently displaces the value of relational forms of care. As an advanced nursing profession subsumed within biomedical models, certified nurse-midwifery must also contend with gendered and racialized reverberations from its history of professionalization. I document how midwifery care emerges and is reconfigured within these systems and histories. By examining how midwives contend with enduring personal and professional dilemmas of care within and beyond the clinic, I argue that midwifery practice necessitates individualized forms of affective labor to sustain its historically driven ideals and show how those deemed responsible for resolving equity gaps, mostly women, are bound by inequities produced in the process of care. Through this analysis, I demonstrate how contemporary labor expectations displace the value of care work while relying on its biopolitical capital to hold together a fracturing (health)care system.

Cultural anthropology students and faculty: EIPs are an important opportunity to support our students in their ethnographic writing as well as practice giving constructive and helpful feedback to elevate the scholarship in our department. We would love to see you there.

Please join EIP next Friday October 23rd at 11 am in zoom and in person in Hale 450 for an EIP with Anna Wynfield and Kelsey Armeni as the discussant.

Please RSVP by Monday October 19th to receive the paper and the zoom link for the event.

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Discussant: PhD Candidate Conor Lanning, Cultural Anthropology

Hale 450 or Zoom

Friendship bracelets in the 2024 US election and the political commodification of emotion

This chapter investigates how friendship bracelets circulated as objects which joy stuck to during the 2024 US election, and how the circulation of these objects commodified emotions for political gain to construct a sense of friendship and community between interactants. This commodification simultaneously served to rhematize (Gal & Irvine, 2019) specific emotions as iconic of opposing political sides, with Democrats viewing joy and positivity as representative of the political left and viewing hate and negativity as iconic of the political right. The findings of this chapter are based on ethnographic study of Swifties for Kamala, and my analysis carries out narrative analysis of small stories (Bamberg and Georgakopoulou, 2008; Georgakopoulou, 2007) told in ethnographic interviews with members of Swifties for Kamala wherein they discussed friendship bracelets in their political work. I critique the commodification of emotions associated with friendship in the political arena and discuss how friendship “provides a critical site for anthropologists to study identity formation, to pose new questions about the articulation of personal and social identities” (Bell & Coleman, 1999, p. 12)

Please RSVP to receive the paper and the zoom link for the event.

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