Gareth Thomas

Threats and thrills: pregnancy apps, risk and consumption

In this article, we draw on the findings of a critical discourse analysis of pregnancy-related mobile software applications designed for smartphones (‘apps’) to examine how such apps configure pregnant embodiment. Drawing on a detailed analysis of all such apps available in June 2015 in the two major global app stores Google Play and Apple App Store, we discuss how such technologies (the ‘threats’ mode of representation) portray the pregnant body as a site of risk requiring careful self-surveillance using apps to reduce potential harm to women and particularly their foetuses. We show that the second dominant mode of representation (‘thrills’) constructs the pregnant body and self-tracking in more playful terms. App developers use ludification strategies and encourage the social sharing of pregnancy-related details as part of emphasising the enjoyable aspects of pregnancy. We found that both types of pregnancy-related apps endorse expectations around pregnancy behaviour that reproduce heteronormative and gendered ideals around sexuality, parenthood and consumption. These apps are sociocultural artefacts enacting pregnant bodies as sites of both risk and pleasure. In both cases, users of the apps are encouraged to view pregnancy as an embodied mode of close monitoring and surveillance, display and performance.

‘It’s not that bad’: Stigma, health, and place in a post-industrial community

This article highlights the importance of dissecting the complex relationship between stigma, health, and place. Drawing on qualitative research with young people in a post-industrial town in the UK, I explore how these young people reflect on their broad sense of health in a stigmatized community. I capture the multiple senses of place experienced by young people and how they come to imagine, negotiate, resist, and accommodate this stigmatization. I conclude by unpacking what implications place-based stigma has for policy as well as for studying young peoples health and wellbeing.

Picture perfect: ‘4D’ ultrasound and the commoditisation of the private prenatal clinic

Non-medical ‘four-dimensional’ ultrasound is commercially advertised as promoting maternal ‘bonding’, providing reassurance and tendering entertaining experiences for expectant parents. Despite the proliferation of this technology, it has not yet been subjected to sufficient social scientific attention. Drawing on an ethnography of a private prenatal clinic in the United Kingdom, I explore how four-dimensional scans, providing detailed real-time images of a foetus, have transformed the prenatal clinic into a site of consumption. I argue that the discourse present in four-dimensional scans and the materiality of the clinic achieve two things. First, they blur the boundary between clinical and non-clinical practices. This must be carefully negotiated by professionals who perform serious emotional labour to balance the delicate tension of offering expertise and medically based reassurance with providing a joyful experience for parents as consumers. Second, the four-dimensional scan and clinic’s materiality promote the notion of ‘perfection’, particularly around the idealised family and future body. I conclude by reflecting on how such non-medical technologies play a central role in the commoditisation of pregnancy, bodies, the family and prenatal care in an increasingly consumer-led market.

An Elephant in the Consultation Room?: Configuring Down Syndrome in British Antenatal Care

This article is based on an ethnographic study of prenatal screening for Down syndrome in two British health care institutions. Drawing on observations of everyday hospital life and interviews with health care professionals, I identify how a discussion of Down syndrome is avoided during prenatal screening consultations. This relative silence is created and upheld because of three things: (1) the British public is considered as knowing what Down syndrome is; (2) the organization of care dictates that the condition is not classified as important enough to justify an explanation within consultations; and (3) professionals frequently admit to having minimal knowledge of Down syndrome. This absence, together with the condition being categorized as a risk or problem, helps produce and uphold its status as a negative pregnancy outcome. I conclude by highlighting the contributions that this article has for anthropologically exploring how ideas around disability intersect with the proliferation of reproductive technologies.

Keeping the Backdoor to Eugenics Ajar?: Disability and the Future of Prenatal Screening.

Noninvasive prenatal testing arguably constitutes a form of eugenics in a social context in which certain reproductive outcomes are not valued.

In/exclusion in the clinic: Down's Syndrome, dysmorphology, and the ethics of everyday medical work

In this article, we draw on two clinical ethnographies to explore how mundane social practices, affective processes and cultural materials (re)produce divisions and forms of in/exclusion. By treating everyday life and routines as serious categories of analysis, we identify how power relations are accomplished and how persons/future persons – namely the ‘dysmorphic’ child or the foetus who has or may have Down’s syndrome – are constituted as un/valued or in/excluded. In relation to dysmorphology, we show how the living dysmorphic child is given shelter but future reproductions of such children are enacted negatively and as to be avoided. With reference to Down’s syndrome, we capture how the condition is made absent in the antenatal clinic and constituted as a negative outcome. In sum, we recognise how exploring the micro and everyday reveals who/what is valued and how particular ways of being in the world are threatened, denied or effaced.

‘The appy for a happy pappy’: Expectant fatherhood and pregnancy apps

ABSTRACT Many mobile software applications (‘apps’) related to pregnancy have been developed for the global market, yet little research has explored how expectant or new fathers are represented in such technologies. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of the descriptions of pregnancy apps available in two major online stores, we identify how these media artefacts represent a problematic version of performing fatherhood. On the one hand, notions of ‘intimate’ fatherhood are enacted by emphasising the importance of men acquiring knowledge about pregnancy/childbirth and providing emotional and informed support to their partner as she experiences pregnancy, childbirth and new motherhood. However, many apps also condescend to expectant fathers and trivialize their role, assuming that they need entertainment, humour and encouragement to promote their involvement. We suggest that such meanings are reflected in wider social expectations, norms and paradoxes in relation to the role of men in contemporary parenthood. Further research is required to explore how men engage with apps and how apps contribute to their understandings and practices of expectant and new fatherhood.

Disability, normalcy, and the everyday

This book brings together scholars to explore understandings of disability, normalcy, and the everyday. The major concern is with the taken-for-granted, mundane human activities at the heart of how social life is reproduced, and how this impacts on the lives of those with a disability, family members, and other allies. Many critical analyses of disability address important ‘macro’ concerns, yet are often far removed from an interactional and micro-level focus. Containing a range of theoretical and empirical (qualitative) contributions from around the world, this book departs from earlier accounts by making sense of how disability is lived, mobilised, and enacted in everyday lives. Although broad in focus and navigating diverse social contexts, contributions are united by a concern with foregrounding micro, mundane moments for making sense of powerful discourses, practices, affects, relations, and world-making for disabled people and their allies. Using different examples – including learning disabilities, cerebral palsy, dementia, polio, and Parkinson’s disease – contributions move beyond a simplified narrow classification of disability which creates rigid categories of existence and denies bodily variation. The chapters unpack (among other things) how people with disabilities interact with others in public and private spaces (and the role of space/place in this), how normalcy is pursued or resisted, how structural conditions shape their lives, and how positive accounts of disablement move beyond narratives of tragedy and pity, and towards discourses of joy, resilience, and the quest for/accomplishment of a ‘good life’. Taken together, the contributions are located within both new and familiar debates around embodiment, stigma, gender, identity, inequality, care, ethics, choice, materiality, youth, and representation. This book, thus, identifies disability as a concern not simply for disability studies scholars, but for academics from different disciplinary backgrounds including sociology, anthropology, humanities, public health, science and technology studies, and social policy.

Blurred lines: the ethics and policy of Greenhouse Gas Removal at scale

The topic of Greenhouse Gas Removal (GGR) for climate geoengineering is becoming increasingly salient following the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report and the Paris Agreement. GGR is thought of as a separate category to mitigation techniques such as low-carbon supply or demand reduction, yet multiple social, ethical and acceptability concerns cut across categories. We propose moving beyond classifying climate strategies as a set of discrete categories (which may implicitly homogenise diverse technologies), towards a prioritisation of questions of scale of both technology and decision-making in the examination of social and ethical risks. This is not just a theoretical issue: important questions for policy, governance and finance are raised, for instance over the future inclusion of GGR in carbon markets. We argue that the conclusions drawn about how best to categorise, govern and incentivise any strategy will depend on the framing used, because different framings could lead to very different policy recommendations being drawn. Because of this, a robust approach to developing, governing and financing GGR should pay attention first to urgent concerns regarding democracy, justice and acceptability.

Doing gender in a hospital setting: reflections of a male researcher

Very little attention has been afforded to how male researchers actively position their gender in their studies, particularly in ethnographic research located within settings populated largely by women. In this article, I reflect on my own gender work during an ethnography of prenatal clinics and how this was articulated with other aspects of my researcher self. By reporting on the successes and failures of this performance, I argue that my gender constituted an essential element in the everyday negotiations between myself and female participants. In so doing, I suggest that reflexive commentaries of how researchers perform gender should not be viewed as a form of egotistic self-indulgence. Rather, they should be read as valuable statements for rendering the researcher visible and, here, for revealing how issues of doing gender play out during fieldwork.