Global health experts are concerned with low nursing rates and are seeking targeted interventions with the potential to substantially improve nursing practices, yet there have been few studies of the history of nursing or milk banking. This project investigates how scientists, medical practitioners, parents, and policy makers have produced diverse forms of knowledge about nursing from the 19th century to the present and how these various understandings have been challenged, upheld, and/or changed. It has five main goals: (1) examine the production and transformation of scientific knowledge about nursing; (2) explore the history of nursing techniques and technologies; (3) investigate changing understandings of the human labor involved in nursing; (4) consider racialized understanding of the labor involved in nursing; and, (5) trace the growth and development of milk banks. Overall, the project will contribute to understanding of why nursing is more or less common at different moments and for whom, and it will be useful for those involved in efforts to support maternal and infant health as it relates to nursing, milk banking, and the decisions families make vis-a-vis infant nutrition.
This project applies historical and qualitative analysis to archival materials and oral histories to examine nursing as intertwined with the histories of wet nursing and milk banking in relation to studies of carework and the commodification of biosubstances. In so doing, it provides a novel perspective on the relationship between racialized understandings of the forms of labor involved in nursing and the development of biobanking practices that depersonalize milk from the women who produce it. The project contributes to ongoing conversations in STS about the ways in which gender, race, and technology are co-constitutive; to historical and sociological studies of reproductive labor, intimate labor, and carework; to gender and women’s studies; and to histories of medicine, public health, labor, and gender.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
