In "Partial Stories: Maternal Death From Six Angles," Claire L. Wendland considers explanations for maternal death, showing how they reflect competing visions of the past and shared concerns about social change.

Drawing on extended fieldwork, Wendland reveals how efforts to legitimize a single story as the authoritative version can render care more dangerous than it might otherwise be. Historical, biological, technological, ethical, statistical and political perspectives on death usually circulate in different expert communities and different bodies of literature.

In this talk, Wendland considers them together, illuminating dilemmas of maternity care in contexts of acute change, chronic scarcity and endemic inequity within Malawi and beyond.

This event is co-sponsored by the Social Science Research Institute and the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in the College of the Liberal Arts.