Facing the Black maternal mortality crisis
Tara Dosumu Diener is an award-winning educator, committed to mentoring other first-generation low income (FLI) scholars and currently teaching in Stanford's Program in Writing and Rhetoric. After receiving a Ph.D. in Anthropology and History from the University of Michigan and a Master's in Bioethics, Humanities, and Society from Michigan State University, she was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Thinking Matters program and at the Center for Biomedical Ethics. Her research has used childbirth as a lens to examine structural violence, institutional biopolitics, and reproductive health in West Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Her approach, informed by a decade of practice as a Registered Nurse, is explicitly intersectional and interdisciplinary, combining archival and ethnographic methods to illuminate vernacular histories of clinical practice and biotechnology. Her work has been published in The Canadian Journal of African Studies and Technology’s Stories by Technology and Culture, and her manuscript, the first ethnographic history of obstetrics in Sierra Leone, will be completed in summer 2021.