My PhD thesis is now complete and available online in the University of the Western Cape repository at https://etd.uwc.ac.za/handle/11394/6946
It was, is, and will
be an apparatus in which boundary-making practices were and will be made,
determined by different agential cuts such as my research questions. The text
that is now available online enables more cuts to be enacted by myself and
others. I’m delighted that such new relationships with my research have the
potential to expand the project beyond the academic product of a doctoral
research thesis.
Barad (2007:146)
points to 6 significant aspects of apparatuses
Apparatuses:
1. are specific material-discursive
practices
2. produce differences that matter which include boundary-making practices that are
formative of matter and meaning, productive of, and part of, the phenomena
produced
3. are material configurations/dynamic
reconfigurings of the world
4. are themselves phenomena which are constituted and dynamically
reconstituted as part of the ongoing intra-activity of the world
5. have no intrinsic boundaries but are
open-ended practices
6. are not located in the world but are
material reconfigurations or reconfigurings of the world that re(con)figure
spatiality and temporality as well as (the traditional notion of) dynamics
(i.e. they do not exist as static structures, nor do they merely unfold or
evolve in time and space)
In my thesis I argue
that medical students’ learning experiences in Obstetrics are crucial in
influencing their future practices as doctors. Graduation is not the closing
off of undergraduate curricular learning but a cyclical becoming-with
past/present/future intra-actions. Although there is a growing body of work
describing the detrimental impact of disrespect in maternity care on new
mothers and their neonates, little is revealed about the impact on students. I
look forward to widening conversations with others in Higher Education taking
up the theoretical lens of Feminist New Materialism.
My hope is that such
engagements can lead to different material-discursive practices as those
described in the research project, which have been silenced through current
trends in professional practices where disrespect to women in labour tends to
remain hidden, and in some situations, even normalized. It is likely that more
questions will arise as a collective relationship develops around those readers
interested in exploring students’ response-abilities in Obstetrics and what
this means to curricular task teams in health sciences training institutions.
Barad, K. 2007. Meeting the universe
halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke
University Press.
