{"title":"Caring for the institution: An ethnography of quality assurance policy in U.S. rural primary care.","authors":"Chloe L Warpinski","doi":"10.1111/maq.70054","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70054","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Based on mixed-methods, ethnographic research in a geographically isolated rural medical center in the upper midwestern United States, this paper explores the social implications of healthcare quality assurance policies highly reliant on managerial logics, including measurement and monitoring programs. Initially observed as expressions of apathy, throughout 21 months of observation in the medical center I increasingly witnessed tensions erupt due to divergent views of quality care. While explicitly intended to improve biomedical care, clinicians were quick to describe how quality assurance policies impeded their ability to provide high-quality primary care in this rural setting. This article theorizes ongoing tensions between patient care and institutional care as a key aspect of the observed organizational discord. The article concludes with recommendations for how to operationalize institutional care in this setting to respond to clinician and staff concerns about the unique challenges of this biomedical practice environment.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70054"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145953489","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Rodante van der Waal, Alana Helberg-Proctor, Dána-Ain Davis, Bahareh Goodarzi
{"title":"Obstetric racism in Europe: Linguistic racism, exoticization, and uneven reproduction in the Netherlands.","authors":"Rodante van der Waal, Alana Helberg-Proctor, Dána-Ain Davis, Bahareh Goodarzi","doi":"10.1111/maq.70053","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, we conceptualize how Davis' two concepts of uneven reproduction and obstetric racism-both rooted in the US context-are effectuated in the Netherlands. We consider uneven reproduction to consist of bio- and necropolitics, namely the management and regulation of a population's bodies, life and death. Through bio- and necropolitics, certain life is optimized by investments, and other life is negated by disinvestments in reproductive care in daily care work through obstetric racism. We develop an understanding of obstetric racism in the Netherlands by analyzing how it operates as a form of uneven reproduction, by providing theoretical depth to the concept of obstetric racism in the context of Europe. Based on data analysis from interviews and focus group conversations on obstetric violence with midwives, doulas, midwives-in-training, and mothers who gave birth within the last 10 years, we link the concept of uneven reproduction to daily practices of obstetric racism in the Netherlands. We find that obstetrics operates on the basis of linguistic racism and othering through exoticization, specifically for women racialized as Black through the racial stereotype of being \"natural birthers,\" while other marginalized racialized women are seen as \"bad birthers.\"</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70053"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2026-01-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145953474","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Extracting vitalities: Cuts in Indigenous women's bodies-territories (Brazil).","authors":"Maria Paula Prates","doi":"10.1111/maq.70052","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70052","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In this article, I explore the connections between the medicalization of childbirth and environmental devastation through Guarani-Mbyá understandings of life and the living. I argue that the cuts made to Guarani-Mbyá women's vaginas (episiotomies) in Brazilian hospitals are experienced and situated on the same cosmopolitical level as the cuts made in their ancestral territories by fences that demarcate soybean plantations and cattle ranches. What I call an extractivism of vitalities occurs precisely through both bodies and territories. In exploring this issue, I highlight connections obvious to Indigenous women: Their bodies and territories are inherently linked by vital forces that are shared and modulated through different qualities of relations involving humans and other-than-human beings.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70052"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145866051","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Searching for safety: Working conditions and policing in a US emergency department.","authors":"Fabián Luis C Fernández","doi":"10.1111/maq.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/maq.70050","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In the United States, emergency departments aren't supposed to turn anyone away. They are the safety-net of the safety-net providing life-saving care. Yet, what happens to healthcare when conditions are so strained that patients and staff lash out at each other? What happens when the safety net becomes a carceral net? I argue that social and economic pressures placed on emergency medicine generate conflict between patients and nurses who increasingly rely on the restriction of resources, use of restraints, and police in healthcare.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":" ","pages":"e70050"},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145858160","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“More Than Just the Two Percent”: The reproductive politics of envisioning abortion and miscarriage in Turner syndrome","authors":"AJ Jones","doi":"10.1111/maq.70022","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70022","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Following the overturning of <i>Roe v. Wade</i>, the political, legal, and medical boundaries of spontaneous, elective, and selective abortion are blurring. Based on ethnographic research on Turner Syndrome, a genetic condition with a 98% miscarriage rate and uncertain abortion rates, this article examines the visual politics of reproduction and disability in the United States through the ambiguous treatment of miscarriage. Although infertile, my interlocutors with Turner syndrome emphasized how disability stereotypes, abortion unknowns, and miscarriage statistics impacted their lives. Centering our play <i>More Than Just the Two Percent</i>, I demonstrate how my interlocutors embodied various actors in reproductive experiences, including miscarried fetuses, to navigate the visibilities of their diagnosis and specify the value of their lives as social funds of knowledge—a process I term <i>envisioning</i>. Envisioning complicates notions of viability, personhood, privacy, spirituality, risk, luck, and survivorship that pro-life/pro-choice rhetorics flatten and may contribute to a more disability-oriented reproductive justice.</p>","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144875999","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Physicians of the future: Doctor-influencers, patient-consumers, and the business of functional medicine By Rosalynn A. Vega, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. 2024. 336 pp.","authors":"Anamaria Iosif Ross","doi":"10.1111/maq.70039","DOIUrl":"10.1111/maq.70039","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47649,"journal":{"name":"Medical Anthropology Quarterly","volume":"39 4","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.9,"publicationDate":"2025-12-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"145772612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}