Detrich Galloway is a PhD student in the Cultural Anthropology Department at the University of California, Riverside. As a visiting research scholar at UWI, Ms. Galloway is studying the Caribbean Healthcare Archives under the supervision of Dr. Stanley Griffin, Head of the Department of Library and Information Studies. Her research focuses on the medical anthropology of maternal and infant health disparities in the U.S. and Jamaica.

Ms. Galloway visited the island to facilitate her research and hosted a seminar on Wednesday, September 25, 2024.

Ms. Galloway posited, “What would happen if the childbirth experience, as told by the birthing person or a non-medical maternal support provider, became the main factor determining equitable maternal and infant health outcomes?”

In the seminar, Ms. Galloway shared her experiences as a “people watcher” and her recent trip to Montego Bay, where she bonded with four women who became her “empty nester sisters”. She emphasized that as the healthcare systems move towards providing more “person-centered” healthcare, clinical providers of maternal and infant healthcare, among other things, must grapple with issues of value recognition and integration of community-based healthcare knowledge contributions and the dismantle of the male-dominated power structures that continue to shape the medicalization of childbirth for the benefit of clinical care providers. These structures, rooted in colonial histories, have ushered in the persistent disparities in maternal and infant mortality and morbidity outcomes experienced by Black women in the U.S., Canada, and the UK for more than a century.

Click “here” to watch the presentation.