Birthing across borders: medical illustrations in Dadaab refugee camps

This paper emerges from a 5-year collaborative research project entitled ‘Birthing across Borders,’ based in one of the world’s largest refugee camps in Dadaab, Kenya. Our project exposes a serious gap between biomedical care and informal maternal care provided by Indigenous midwives. Despite the demand for Indigenous midwives by refugee women themselves, midwives remain outlawed. We show how this systemic exclusion of culturally relevant maternal care has deadly impacts (Bagelman & Gitome, 2019). Here our paper considers the role of medical illustrations in enhancing understandings of midwifery care. We draw on a growing literature exploring 'graphic pathographies', a sub-genre of graphic stories educating patients and practitioners about health matters (Green, 2009). Vitally, this visual tool offers rich opportunities to express the affective, experiential dimensions of health as well as enhance diverse medical literacies. Working alongside refugee midwives, we experiment with translating midwifery knowledge in ways that may be integrated into critical medical training. We situate this work in the long-standing practice of medical illustration. We do so, however, by working to decolonise this tradition through centring southern knowledges and geographies, perilously marginalised.

Jen Bagelman

Dr Jen Bagelman is Reader in Human Geography and Deputy Director for the Institute for Social Science at Newcastle University. Her academic and activist work critically examines how displacement is produced through exclusionary citizenship and bordering practices. She is also deeply interested in how people mobilize to enact more loving geopolitics.

Carly Bagelman

Dr Carly Bagelman is Senior Lecturer in Education Studies at Liverpool Hope University. Her current research considers the ways in which UK schools respond to the challenges and possibilities of forced migration. In particular, she looks at how the Schools of Sanctuary movement endeavours to create welcome for newly arrived (refugee/asylum seeker) students through induction and curriculum, and educate all students about the nature of forced migration and welcome. She also looks at informal educational spaces responding to forced migration.

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