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Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9843-2041

AccessType

Campus-Only Access for Five (5) Years

Document Type

dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Degree Program

Anthropology

Year Degree Awarded

2020

Month Degree Awarded

September

First Advisor

Jacqueline Urla

Second Advisor

Julie Hemment

Third Advisor

Laura Briggs

Fourth Advisor

Lynn Morgan

Subject Categories

Anthropology | Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies | Near and Middle Eastern Studies | Social and Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

What happens when an increasingly authoritarian government utilizes new digital technologies (big data platforms and centralized databases) in order to monitor its citizens and their reproductive behavior? Whose data are captured, stored, and circulated? By whom, how, and to what end are these data used? And what do these ever-spreading practices of high-tech monitoring tell us about new regimes of population governance, as well as novel forms of individual agency? This dissertation takes up these questions to probe the sociopolitical, material, and subjective effects of new forms of reproductive health surveillance instituted in Turkey. Through the case-study of a controversial public health infrastructure known as GEBLIZ (Pregnancy, Newborn, and Post-Partum Monitoring System), I examine how globally driven digital technologies are implemented, negotiated, and tinkered with in the age of selective state pro-natalism. This research combines eighteen months of participant observation and interviews in and around health clinics in Istanbul with a close analysis of policy materials and activist documents. This analysis brings into view the perspectives of two groups of women who are subjected to digital health technologies, yet mostly absent from public or scholarly debates: nurses and their patients. I focus on the experiences of these groups with the aim of not only making visible the gendered labor behind these seemingly democratizing technologies, but also illuminating how the emerging digital modalities of governance direct this labor towards particular classed and racialized bodies. I argue that the selective knowledge production about women’s bodies via globally driven new digital technologies is contingent upon reshaping their labor—and often making it more vulnerable—in the interface of medical communities.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.7275/18845373

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

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