Writing Ourselves into (BE)ing

Abstract

We are Imagining Birth Equity (I-BE)— an interdisciplinary collaboratory of reproductive anthropologists and epidemiologists dedicated to re-centering Black maternal health experiences utilizing A Lordian framework for birth justice research. Improving US perinatal health and mitigating racial inequity beginning at birth are national priorities, but we question: What if the established research tools that we use to study pregnancy/birthing health are part of the problem? I-BE draws inspiration from Afrofuturism and speculative fiction, reminding us that if we cannot envision our hopes and dreams for a different world, we cannot align to bring them about. We use a community-led research process engaging art, poetry, ethnography, and population data science to imagine more equitable futures—rejecting false dichotomies that don’t serve us (i.e., qualitative/quantitative, art/science, personal/professional). Rooted in the poetry and vision of Audre Lorde, we problematize the tools and frameworks common in research, and elevate imagination, self-determination, and expression. We aim to find and spread new ways of doing public health scholarship that promote joy, pleasure, and caremongering in place of competition, fear, and precarity. This poem tells the story of our shared work as whole people finding space and belonging for our voices in a public health academy that has not always felt like home. Here we develop a counternarrative to the epistemic violence of the academy that often diminishes creative knowledge as secondary to “real” or “hard” science. This poem is about rejecting these dichotomies, finding healing in the in-betweens, and creating new tools to discover research as celebration.