Death situated in life personhood, pregnancy loss, & the politics of death with Dr Aimee Middlemiss
Deaths which are politically and socially contested have been a key focus for death studies and adjacent fields of inquiry (Boss 2004; Butler 2006; Doka 1989; Robson & Walter 2013; Scheper-Hughes 1993).
In this talk, I argue that examination of experiences of death in, and shortly after, pregnancy sheds light on many of the political issues implicated in death studies. Drawing on my multi-sited ethnographic research about women’s experiences of second trimester pregnancy loss in England and collaborations with other researchers (Middlemiss 2024; Middlemiss et al. 2024; Middlemiss & Kilshaw 2023 [Online First]),
I show how the core concept of personhood connects disparate political themes when pregnancies end in death. This includes the politics of personhood and the foetus; abortion politics; biopolitics and the state; the power of biomedicine; hierarchies of loss and grievability; and resistance and agency in bereavement and mourning. Research into subjects which are controversial, contested, and politically sensitive is crucially important in death studies, in order to avoid reproducing normative ideas about death and bereavement, and in order to challenge orthodoxies in wider society.
The particularity of second trimester pregnancy loss in England is an example of how the field can offer knowledge which goes beyond descriptive accounts of experiences of death to analyse ideas, structures, institutions, and individual responses as component parts of a complex whole: death situated in life.
Speaker bio: Aimee Middlemiss is an interdisciplinary social scientist who draws on sociology, anthropology and STS to investigate the politics of reproduction and death. Previous projects include the lay use of foetal Dopplers to provide evidence of foetal life during pregnancy, and the reproductive politics of second trimester pregnancy loss.
She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Plymouth, but will shortly be returning to the University of Exeter where she will undertake a Wellcome funded Early Career Fellowship investigating the politics of the cervical stitch, used in pregnancies thought to be a risk of foetal loss.