Maieutic endeavours: Theorizing Midwifery Practices

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Annekatrin Skeide
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: since 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 516781962

The scientific network “Maieutic endeavours: Theorizing Midwifery Practices” will bring together midwifery scientists at different stages of their careers to establish midwifery as an academic discipline in the wake of midwifery’s academization in Germany based on the amended law for midwives. The network members will do so by: a. identifying and analyzing local, social, and epistemological divides between midwifery theory and practice; b. re-examining and developing midwifery scientific concepts; c. drawing together interdisciplinary methodological, theoretical, and methodical approaches systematically to develop methodological tools fitting midwifery as a practice-based science; d. building infrastructures to promote midwifery research strategically and to safeguard continuity between midwifery research, academic training, and care activities. The conversation between network members will be nourished by inviting international guests from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, including midwifery, in order to discuss social scientific, historical, philosophical insights into midwifery scientific concerns. The results of these conversations will build a body of midwifery scientific knowledge for research, education, and practice, and prepare for the research and communication infrastructures necessary to support the young scientific discipline of midwifery science. Assembling protagonists of midwifery’s academization in Germany together in a scientific network with the aim of developing midwifery as an academic discipline is urgently needed. Both contemporarily and in the years to come, midwifery professors must prioritize setting up midwifery study programs. High teaching loads add to the multitude of conceptional and organizational tasks in order to conceive and implement new study programs, most of which are hosted by universities of applied sciences. In universities, midwifery study programs are usually based in medical faculties where medical research paradigms predominate.

• DFG Programme: Scientific Networks
• Co-Investigator: Professorin Dr. Dorothea Tegethoff