The trouble with maternal death narratives: Race, representation, and reproduction.

The high risk of maternal death in Africa has cast a shadow over representations and experiences of pregnancy and childbirth. In the 1980s, amid new awareness of disparities in maternal mortality rates between high and low-income countries, tragic anecdotes of women dying during childbirth emerged as a tool to garner political and economic support for global health interventions aimed at women. While successfully raising public concern and billions of dollars in aid, given that these stories are some of the few stories of African women so widely circulated, it is important to ask: what else does the genre of maternal death narrative do? How might discursive practices around childbirth structure the care offered to African women? What power relations are revealed in this form of knowledge production and promotion? This article examines how maternal death narratives function, circulate, and structure potential solutions to the problem of maternal mortality. In focusing on the pathways to death, women's bodies are foregrounded as sites of knowledge production over their experiences. I use fieldwork with pregnant and birthing women in southwest Nigeria to explore the ways that women piece together different sources of care in an effort to ensure successful deliveries amidst considerable uncertainty.

COVID-19 and the political geography of racialisation: Ethnographic cases in San Francisco, Los Angeles and Detroit.

The COVID-19 pandemic has overwhelmed health systems around the globe, and intensified the lethality of social and political inequality. In the United States, where public health departments have been severely defunded, Black, Native, Latinx communities and those experiencing poverty in the country's largest cities are disproportionately infected and disproportionately dying. Based on our collective ethnographic work in three global cities in the U.S. (San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit), we identify how the political geography of racialisation potentiated the COVID-19 crisis, exacerbating the social and economic toll of the pandemic for non-white communities, and undercut the public health response. Our analysis is specific to the current COVID19 crisis in the U.S, however the lessons from these cases are important for understanding and responding to the corrosive political processes that have entrenched inequality in pandemics around the world.