Beware: unusual room! B-3220 3150 Jean-Brillant

The talk will focus on the role of translated personal narratives in the production and dissemination of knowledge within maternal and neonatal health. There is growing recognition within medical/health humanities that subjective experience can be a legitimate source of knowledge and that experiential information can complement, enhance, as well as challenge, the conventional wisdom disseminated by institutions and authorities. Birth stories are noteworthy examples of such knowledge and experience being passed on from one person to the next, one generation to the next, and one language and culture to another.

The talk will first elaborate on the importance of examining birth stories shared online and in print among parents as resources for birth preparation, and on studying them from the perspective of narrative theory, in order to examine how personal narratives are circulated with a view to challenge the deeply ingrained public narratives on women’s bodies and social position within a given society. It will then discuss a key text within the natural/positive birth movement and its Turkish translation: the American midwife Ina May Gaskin’s classic work Guide to Childbirth (2003, translated into Turkish in 2014), which includes 126 pages of stories. These are stories of births that took place at The Farm Midwifery Centre in Tennessee, in the 1970s and thus date back to a time when birth outside a hospital setting was regarded as unconventional in the United States. The ‘re-telling’ of these personal narratives some four decades later in Turkey, in a country where birth is highly medicalized and technologized, acts as a catalyst for ongoing local debates on maternal and neonatal health.

Biodata

Şebnem Susam-Saraeva is a Senior Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, U.K. and currently the Bank of Montreal Visiting Scholar at the Institute of Feminist and Gender Studies, University of Ottawa. Her research interests have included gender and translation, retranslations, translation of literary and cultural theories, research methodology in translation studies, internationalization of the discipline, translation and popular music, and translation and social movements. She is the author of Translation and Popular Music. Transcultural Intimacy in Turkish-Greek Relations (2015) and Theories on the Move. Translation’s Role in the Travels of Literary Theories (2006), and guest-editor of Translation and Music (2008) and Non-Professionals Translating and Interpreting. Participatory and Engaged Perspectives (2012, with Luis Pérez-González). Beyond the University of Edinburgh, she is the Chair of the ARTIS Steering Committee (Advancing Research in Translation and Interpreting Studies, https://artisinitiative.org/).