Timeline: June 1, 2026-May 31, 2030
Funding institution: Swiss National Science Foundation
Team
Nicole Bourbonnais, Principal Investigator, the Geneva Graduate Institute
Ogechukwu Williams, Project Partner, University of Buffalo
Paula Orozco Espinel, Post-Doctoral Fellow, the Geneva Graduate Institute
overview
Over the past 70+ years, the World Health Organization (WHO) has established itself as a leading expert on maternal health, covering everything from pregnancy to childbirth to breastfeeding. The organization's work and authority is grounded in a strong commitment to scientific principles, neutrality, and evidence-based research. But knowledge production is never an entirely neutral endeavor: the very questions we ask, what kinds of experts we turn to for answers, the evidence that we choose to include/exclude, and the language we use are also shaped by historical, social, political, cultural and institutional contexts. The creation of global standards can also have powerful implications for people’s lives, reaching far beyond their technical scope.
The Global Maternity project analyzes how these processes shaped the WHO’s work on maternity from 1948-2008, asking four central questions:
- Who produced what types of knowledge about maternity at the WHO in these years?
- What underlying assumptions, ideologies, hierarchies, agendas and tensions have shaped the regulation and standardization of global maternity?
- How did mothers themselves respond to and/or intervene in these processes?
What are the implications of this history for contemporary discussions of maternal health and global governance more broadly?
approach
The project team will use a mix of archival research and oral history to answer these questions across three central pillars.
Pillar I – “Global maternity from/through the HQ” will provide the first book-length analysis of the evolution of maternity work at the WHO headquarters from 1948-2008.
Pillar II – “Global Maternity Through Micro-History” – will zoom in on 4 micro-historical case studies on the themes of death (the production of maternal mortality statistics), birth (guidance/best standards for pregnancy and childbirth), breast (the regulation of infant feeding) and mind (the visibility/invisibility of maternal mental health). These will be presented in a co-edited volume and a series of journal articles.
Pillar III: "The past, present and future of global maternity”, will actively insert the project’s findings into larger conversations among policymakers and the public through several public events, a research-policy workshop, and the development of a 4-part podcast series.
context
The contemporary backlash against multilateralism has directly impacted the WHO and other global health institutions, while bringing deeper questions about the role of international organizations to the forefront of public debate. For debates about the present and future of global health and governance to be meaningful, however, we need to first understand the past: to see what was actually done, by whom, and with what implications. The Global Maternity project will provide this grounding for one of the most intimate realms of international intervention: the creation of life itself.
With support from the Swiss National Science Foundation
