Undocumented Motherhood: Gender,Maternal Identity,and the Politics of Health Care

ABSTRACT

Undocumented Mexican immigrants have had to regularly confront a prohibiting health care system despite alienation, marginalization, and the threat of deportation. In this article, I explore the impact of political exclusion and alienating discourses on the health habitus of undocumented Mexican mothers through the narrative of one mother, Marta Garza, who finds herself at the painful intersection of political and medical alienation. Marta’s narrative reflects an analytical framework that centers undocumented motherhood as a space of necessary resilience and strain, wherein she is forced to advocate for her children’s health despite prohibitive barriers and dangerous potential consequences.     

Constructing queer mother‐knowledge and negotiating medical authority in online lesbian pregnancy journals

Medical interactions around reproduction are increasingly extending beyond the physician's office and onto the Internet, where negotiation with medical authority occurs in complex and dynamic ways. Recently, scholars have noted the Internet's potential for creating spaces where women can dialogue with and reconstruct medical authority, yet this growing body of work is overwhelming heteronormative. This paper thus interrogates how lesbian women use the Internet to challenge, deploy, and rework medical authority around reproduction while navigating the transition to parenthood. I draw from 17 online journals authored by lesbian couples during the conception, pregnancy, and birth of their first child, each spanning between 18 months and 2 years, in order to understand how the transition process unfolds over time. I argue that lesbian couples engage with medical authority when seeking affirmation and normalisation yet discard and publicly reject the heteronormative assumptions that accompany reproductive medicine. Further, they chart a new process that I term ‘constructing queer mother‐knowledge’, in which they critique and balance knowledges from institutionalised medicine, their own bodies, and their queer communities. With this new concept, I complicate understandings of lesbian mothers‐to‐be and their interactions with medical authority as they build subversive families.     

Ethics as ritual: smoothing over moments of dislocation in biomedicine

Applications of biomedical R&D currently imply substantial societal concerns. This paper explores, based on semi‐structured interviews with scientists in Norway, how biomedical researchers experience and tackle such concerns in their daily work. It shows how ritualised routine responses to dislocatory moments help maintain order in the daily work of the interviewed scientists; they do not address directly but instead smooth over concerns by a ritualised way of using ethics. This may foreclose substantive reflection and function as a stabiliser for ‘business as usual’. Overall, the current way of responding to concerns as described by the interviewees may contribute to a depoliticisation of important issues. The paper contributes to sociological work on ethics by linking it to recent discussions on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and by the empirical research presented. The insights can also help improve science policies such as RRI.     

Valuing height: diagnosis,valuation and the case of idiopathic short stature

This paper proposes a ‘valuographic’ approach to diagnosis, exploring how values and valuation practices are implicated in the contested diagnostic category of idiopathic short stature (ISS). ISS describes children who are ‘abnormally’ short but do not have any other detectable pathology. In the USA growth‐promoting hormone therapy has been approved for ISS children, since 2003. However, no other jurisdiction has approved this treatment and the value of ISS as a diagnostic category remains disputed among healthcare professionals. Drawing on qualitative interviews with paediatric endocrinologists in the UK and the US, this study presents a historical snapshot illustrating how the problematisation of ISS as a diagnosis involved multiple registers of value including epistemic, economic and moral calculations of worth. Contestation of the diagnosis was not just about what counts but about what ought to be counted, as respondents’ accounts of ISS gave differential weight to a range of types of evidence and methods of assessment. Ultimately what was at stake was not just the value of increased height for short patients, but what it meant to properly practice paediatric endocrinology. Consideration is then given to how a valuographic approach can be applied to sociological studies of diagnosis more broadly.     

嗜肺军团菌致病性与效应蛋白的研究进展

嗜肺军团菌是一种可以引起军团菌肺炎和庞蒂亚克热的兼性胞内病原菌，主要侵染阿米巴原虫和人类巨噬细胞。该菌在宿主胞内能依靠Dot/Icm IVB型分泌系统产生的效应蛋白成功逃避溶酶体的降解。本文主要对嗜肺军团菌的致病物质、胞内存活与增殖机制及其效应蛋白的生物学功能进行综述，详细介绍嗜肺军团菌的毒力因子与致病机制，为军团病防治的研究提供新思路，也为其他胞内病原菌所致感染性疾病的研究提供重要的借鉴意义。     

Bone mineral density changes after parathyroidectomy are dependent on biochemical profile

Background

Bone mineral density (BMD) has been found to improve after parathyroidectomy (PTX) in patients with primary hyperparathyroidism. There are few data on the effect of PTX on BMD in normocalcemic and normohormonal primary hyperparathyroidism.

The importance of how research participants think they are perceived: results from an electronic monitoring study of antiretroviral therapy in Uganda

Novel monitoring technologies in HIV research, such as electronic adherence monitors (EAMs), have changed the nature of researcher-participant interactions. Yet little is known about how EAMs and the resulting interaction between researchers and participants affect research participation and the data gathered. We interviewed participants and research assistants (RAs) in an observational cohort study involving EAMs for HIV antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Uganda. We qualitatively explored interviewees’ views about ethical issues surrounding EAMs and assessed data with conventional and directed content analysis. Participants valued their relationships with RAs and were preoccupied with RAs’ perceptions of them. Participants were pleased when the EAM revealed regular adherence, and annoyed when it revealed non-adherence that contradicted self-reported pill-taking behavior. For many, the desire to maintain a good impression incentivized adherence. But some sought to creatively conceal non-adherence, or refused to use the EAM to avoid revealing non-adherence to RAs. These findings show that participants’ perceptions of the study staff's perceptions of them affected the experience of being monitored, study participation, and ultimately the data gathered in the study. Investigators in monitoring-based research should be aware that social interactions between participants and study staff could affect both the practical and ethical conduct of that research.