Eliza Williamson & Meryleen Mena
We are so pleased to learn The Association for Feminist Anthropology has announced two winners for the 2017 Dissertation Award, both alumnae of our department. This award is given to support the writing phase of a dissertation that makes a significant contribution to feminist anthropology
The winner of the award, Eliza Williamson, is a 2009 graduate of CU-Boulder, with majors in women and gender studies and Spanish and Portuguese language and culture. Williamson is working on her PhD at Rice University and is completing her dissertation, “Birth in Crisis: Public Policy and the Humanization of Childbirth in Brazil,” under the advisement of Dr. Eugenia Georges.
An honorable mention was also awarded to Meryleen Mena, who has completed our Graduate Certificate in Women and Gender Studies and is a current PhD student in Anthropology. She is working with Dr. Donna Goldstein on her dissertation, “Women Detained: Justice and Institutional Violence in the São Paulo Criminal Justice System."
Both recipients will be recognized at the AFA annual meeting on November 30, 2017.
From the AFA press release:
Williamson's dissertation examines the implementation of public health policy aimed at “humanizing” childbirth in Brazil’s public health system. Tracking the Rede Cegonha (Stork Network) program from the federal Ministry of Health to local clinics and communities in Salvador, Bahia, she shows how the concept of humanized birth—at its core, a turn toward evidence-based, demedicalized, respectful birth care—is put into practice in a context of persistent, racialized social inequities and widespread economic and political crisis. Drawing on 23 months of ethnographic fieldwork, she asks how women, healthcare professionals, and government agents imagine, effect, and experience the Brazilian State’s attempts to change not just techniques and practices, but the very ethics of care in childbirth. She also shows how these ethics were challenged by the Zika virus outbreak and its reproductive consequences, underlining the problematics of Brazilian maternal and infant health policy in its current forms.
Mena's dissertation research is entitled “Women Detained: Justice and Institutional Violence in the São Paulo Criminal Justice System.” This research draws from 18 months of fieldwork in São Paulo’s criminal courts and in women’s prisons where she investigated the experience of women incarcerated. In her research, she asks: how do detained women perceive the effects of structural violence in São Paulo? The majority of women and trans men in prison in Brazil are Black or Brown individuals from lower-income communities. These are the same communities that have been criminalized historically. In the aftermath of the 2006 drugs laws which aimed to decriminalize drug use in Brazil, the police has targeted Black and Brown women and other “gender outlaws.” One major consequence of this policing is the surge in women’s incarceration.Her broader argument is that rather than function as a place of discipline and rehabilitation to re-integrate criminal offenders back into society, for the thousands of individuals detained in female penitentiaries, prisons are spaces of terror and madness-making. In these civic slaughterhouses, those who survive do not emerge rehabilitated, but rather grapple with PTSD and upon release often have little-to-no safety nets, which ultimately contributes to recidivism. The criminal justice system thus fails Black and Brown women in particular because anti-Black violence is institutionalized and inextricably linked to Brazil’s ethos: a multiracial society with deep problems of racial-, gender-, and class-based injustices. Despite the inhumane conditions and structural violence that defines prison life for many individuals, however, with a support network, some ex-prisoners participate in prison reform efforts. she underscores the conditions they live in during incarceration, and the strategies they use after they receive parole to self-preserve and support their communities.