{"id":281,"date":"2017-09-04T19:02:53","date_gmt":"2017-09-04T19:02:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/?page_id=281"},"modified":"2018-05-31T15:10:02","modified_gmt":"2018-05-31T15:10:02","slug":"jennifer-west","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/profiles\/jennifer-west\/","title":{"rendered":"Jennifer West"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JenniferTitle: <\/strong>Dr.<\/p>\n

University: <\/strong>Gordon College<\/p>\n

Email: <\/strong>jennifer.west@gordon.edu<\/p>\n

Twitter: <\/strong>N\/A<\/p>\n

Website: <\/strong>N\/A<\/p>\n

Description of Work:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Broadly speaking, my scholarship engages with texts at the intersections of health, medicine, science, and women\u2019s embodied experiences, especially those that have been medicalized. As a rhetorician, I am interested in the spaces where meanings about women\u2019s embodied and\/or medicalized experiences are written, and what work they do to persuade their audiences of how to see them, think about them, and so how to treat them. As a Writing Program Administrator, I am also interested in the ways that the producers of such texts use writing and think about the act of writing. Right now, I am working on a series of articles about women who write about childbirth online in order to advocate for more ethical, humane, and woman-centered maternity care. Drawing on public sphere theory (especially the notion of feminist counterpublics as articulated by Michael Warner and Nancy Fraser), the work of rhetoricians who have illuminated other (counter)publics engaged with health and medicine like Susan Wells, Blake Scott, and Lisa Keranen, my work highlights the work of what Rosa Eberly has called \u201ccitizen critics,\u201d but rather than engaging in a literary public sphere, the voices I\u2019m listening to are engaging in the medical public sphere as citizens who write because they want to be part of changing the landscape of women\u2019s health care. I am especially attentive to the ways that they use and talk about scientific information and the tensions that emerge in their conceptions of personal experience, women\u2019s embodied knowledge, and scientific evidence.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

I am also in a new administrative position in my small, liberal arts college, so I am looking for ways to maintain an active research agenda while balancing the many responsibilities of a WPA. I am interested in pursuing institutional research about the health and well-being of students from underrepresented groups and am in the very preliminary stages of collaborating with our office of Multicultural Initiatives to develop a research plan. I am especially interested in how our students use writing in our first-year seminar course to navigate the racial dynamics of the institution, especially by using the language of health, emotional stability, and mental well-being.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Symposium Submission:<\/strong><\/h3>\n

\u2018A Case of Bad Data\u2019: Rhetorics of Science and Narrative in Online Writing about Home Birth\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

The relationship between science and narrative in the practice of medicine has long been an area of interest for humanities scholars.1<\/span> In this article, I am concerned with the tension between science and narrative in the politics of homebirth, particularly in how \u201cscience\u201d and \u201cstory\u201d function in the discourse of the American Congress of Obstetrics and Gynecology and in the online discourse of midwifery and home birth advocates. In order to examine this tension, I want to focus on one particular moment of rhetorical exchange between the two groups: an online survey posted by ACOG in 2009 and the response to that survey in the online community of birth advocates.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In the last several years, ACOG\u2019s opposition to the practice of homebirth has gained a new virulence, largely in response to increasing numbers of women choosing to birth at home, legislation to license and regulate midwifery in many states, media coverage of documentaries like The Business of Being Born<\/i>, and the publication of two new international studies reporting the safety of midwife-attended home birth. Meanwhile, a growing activist community supporting midwifery, homebirth, and maternity care reform in hospitals has developed a network of blogs, email list-servs, Facebook groups, and online message boards that explicitly promote the midwifery model of care, often by working to revise the discourse of institutionalized obstetrics.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In August of 2009, the (then-named) American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology2<\/span> posted a survey on the front page of their website entitled \u201cComplications Related to Home Delivery.\u201d The opening description read:\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists is concerned that recent increases in elective home delivery will result in an increased complication and morbidity rate. Recent reports to the office indicate our members are being called in to handle those emergencies and in some instances have been named in legal proceedings. To attempt to determine the extent of the problem, a registry of these cases will be maintained at ACOG on a year-by-year basis. If you have been called in to attend, whether in the emergency room, operating room or labor and delivery suite, a patient who came to your hospital after an unsuccessful attempt at elective home delivery, please complete the following survey, even if there was no adverse outcome.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The survey contained fields for State, Month\/Year, Gravidity, Parity, Maternal Age, Gestational Age, Problem, Fetal Outcome, Pre-Arrival Length of Labor, and Home Attendant. The final field in the survey read, \u201cThis survey IS NOT collecting any identifying information from the respondents. To help detect any accidental duplicate submissions, please select the numeric value of your birthday month + day (optional).\u201d Every field contained a predetermined list of answers to choose from, and the \u201cProblem\u201d field was the only one with a blank field available for respondents to enter text themselves.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

On Thursday, August 27, 2009, the Communications Director for The Big Push for Midwives Campaign sent a message to members of the campaign\u2019s email list alerting them to the ACOG survey and urging women to fill in the survey with their own birth information. The message read:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Tell ACOG your birth story! ACOG has a new database to collect anonymous data on \u201cunsuccessful home births.\u201d Let\u2019s flood the database with entries on SUCCESSFUL home births! It will take less than five minutes, but having even 25 people do it will send a loud and clear message and may force them to take it down due to bad data.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The message also included specific instructions about what to fill in for each question. The call was circulated widely on other list-servs, message boards, Facebook, Twitter, and blogs authored by midwives and other birth advocates. Less than 12 hours later, the survey had been password-protected so that only ACOG members could access it. As this was discovered, participants in the online communities updated the message boards with announcements that the interference had worked.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By the following Monday, after The Big Push sent out a press release with the title, \u201cViral Internet Campaign Exposes Bogus Research on the \u2018Problem\u2019 of Increased Demand for Midwife Care,\u201d online news sources like The Huffington Post<\/i> and Reality Check<\/i> were picking up the story, and bloggers within the birth advocacy community were following up with interpretations of the survey take-down and its implications, including passing around a tongue-and-cheek revision of the original survey, \u201cComplications Related to Hospital Delivery\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

By looking carefully at the ways rhetors in the birth advocacy community use words like \u201cscience,\u201d \u201cnarrative,\u201d and \u201cdata\u201d in a series of online texts central to this moment of interference, I want to explore what appears to be a dichotomy that posits science and knowledge on one side and narrative and bias on the other side. At the same time, however, it seems that the way these terms are deployed often destabilizes that binary by calling attention to the rhetorical character of scientific and anecdotal information. I am interested in how this moment might serve as a case study for thinking about how the rhetorical constructions of science figures into the public debate over institutionalized medicine\u2019s authority over childbirth.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Title: Dr. University: Gordon College Email: jennifer.west@gordon.edu Twitter: N\/A Website: N\/A Description of Work: Broadly speaking, my scholarship engages with texts at the intersections of health, medicine, science, and women\u2019s … Continue reading “Jennifer West”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":2,"menu_order":54,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-281","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=281"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":791,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/281\/revisions\/791"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/medicalrhetoric.com\/symposium2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=281"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}