Episode 2: Adeola Oni-Orisan on Maternal Death Narratives

The Global Health Politics Podcast

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In this episode, I sit down with Dr. Adeola Oni-Orisan. who is an Assistant Professor of Family and Community Medicine at UC-Davis. Dr. Oni-Orisan holds an MD from Harvard Medical School and a PhD in Medical Anthropology from UCSF and is an expert in community-centered research, qualitative research, critical race theory, Black feminist studies, and science and technology studies. She has conducted research on issues related to reproductive health, global health, development, religion, and informal sites of care in Nigeria, Zambia, and the United States. Her work on the production of statistics related to maternal mortality has been prominently featured in the wonderful edited volume by Vincanne Adams, Metrics: What Counts in Global Health and PJ Brown and Svea Closser’s Foundations of Global Health: An Interdisciplinary Reader. More recently, she’s published on COVID-19 and the political geography of racialization in San Francisco. Her recent article, published in Global Public Health -- “The Trouble with Maternal Death Narratives” -- critically examines how stories of women dying during childbirth have been used as a tool to mobilize support for global health interventions aimed at women in poor countries.