Theses and Dissertations
This collection includes both ASU Theses and Dissertations, submitted by graduate students, and the Barrett, Honors College theses submitted by undergraduate students.
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- Creators: Brian, Jennifer
Description
The first global estimate of maternal mortality in 1985 revealed that over half a million women die each year due to pregnancy related causes. Although a relatively small figure compared to the deaths attributed to such diseases as malaria and HIV, this was new data. New data meant attraction from powerful international agency leaders, which eventually led to the formation of a global effort called the Safe Motherhood Initiative (SMI). In turn, the global SMI provided the framework for the World Health Organization's (WHO) Millennium Development Goal 5 (MDG 5). Both of these global campaigns, which were largely implemented through advocacy efforts, adopted time sensitive goals aimed specifically to decrease maternal mortality. Although the placement of maternal health on the public health agenda was an extraordinary accomplishment for women's health advocates, a historical examination of safe motherhood efforts will reveal that these advocacy techniques would not keep maternal health on the public health agenda. Over two decades of unsuccessful efforts to reduce maternal mortality have shown that advocacy efforts are not the answer to actually decreasing maternal mortality ratios. Due to the intrinsic difficulties in measuring maternal mortality, and the public health sector's emphasis in prioritizing the political agenda based on such measurements, maternal health has arguably fallen in last place on the agenda. This thesis will explore how the concern for mothers influenced the formation of MDG 5, and how MDG 5 has been translated into local practices. A case study of the Pan American Health Organization's advocacy effort also called the Safe Motherhood Initiative explores the underlying, culturally complex problems that are hindering progress of MDG 5. The results show that the lack of comprehensive reproductive health services for women is not only due to poor health systems in place, which is what many safe motherhood 5 efforts have attempted to address, but also due to cultural traditions and laws on sexual and reproductive health forbidding women to obtain the care they need to survive.
ContributorsAntonios, Nathalie (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis director) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2013-12
Description
Informed Consent is a ubiquitous way of enshrining choice in the United States which regulates social relations in domains as varied as health, research, access to institutions, and prisons. Informed consent describes an imagined epistemic relationship between right knowledge and legitimate choice, where judgements of capacitation determine whether a person is the right sort of person to take up knowledge which will render them agential under conditions of asymmetrical power. It has been developed over and over to solve problems of injustice, where the injustice in question is understood in terms of undue infringement on individual autonomy, and the logic of informed consent is re-invented to reframe the problem at hand as a rightful matter of individual choice. It is imagined to respect autonomy, and to perform a transformative "moral magic" that makes the forbidden quotidian. This dissertation develops this account of informed consent through a series of cases, each of which explicates different aspects of the technopolitics of informed consent. It begins with genetic counseling as a paradigm case in the logic of informed consent: a well-developed field that emerged to inform people about genetics and genomics in the interest not only of individual reproductive choice, but in opposition to eugenic shaping of populations through genetic knowledge. Next, pro- and anti- abortion deployments of informed consent illustrate an epistemology of information itself, which is understood to agentialize as well as to serve as a site for refusing choice to those deemed incapacitated. Third, liability waivers and requests for student informed consent on university campuses during the pandemic show informed consent to be a tool for the exercise of biopolitics and, in particular, for making responsible subjects. Finally, civil libertarian opposition to migrant genetic testing on the grounds that migrants weren’t asked for consent demonstrates a tight coupling between consent, imaginations of just state-subject relations, and what it means to be recognized as a person. Ultimately, this dissertation argues for a practice of attention that sees informed consent as an important site for the exercise of power and offers frameworks for analyzing it as such.
ContributorsDietz, Elizabeth A (Author) / Hurlbut, Ben (Thesis advisor) / Reynolds, Joel M (Committee member) / Brian, Jennifer (Committee member) / Ellison, Karin (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2023