"Culturally adapted care"? South Asian mothers and the NHS in postwar Britain
Examination of the medical pathologization of South Asian women in Britain through the lens the 1984 "Asian Mother and Baby Campaign."
This paper examines the medical pathologization of South Asian women in Britain through the lens of the 1984 "Asian Mother and Baby Campaign". Its target audience is students and staff interested in the history of "culturally adapted care", as well as the broader histories of health in postcolonial Britain.
This paper examines how public health campaigns that set out to provide "culturally adapted care" helped to pathologize South Asian women in Britain and place them under medical surveillance. It uses the 1984 “Asian Mother and Baby Campaign” (AMBC) to show that while the AMBC was designed to make healthcare more accessible, its attempt to "medically integrate" South Asian women served to uphold medical hierarchies and construct post-imperial racial formations. As the testimonies of healthcare professionals, users of the campaign, and women’s health activists reveal, the AMBC’s vision for healthcare reform was tied to racialized and class-based discourses around citizenship and belonging. This paper thus interrogates what public health campaigns like the AMBC tell us about healthcare spaces and how they have been used to recalibrate imperial racial formations in order to manage and maintain racial difference in Britain. By focusing on British South Asian women’s healthcare in this way, this paper makes a critical contribution to scholarship on race, health citizenship, and the limitations of multicultural ideals in late twentieth-century Britain.
Speaker
Dr Saima Nasar
Saima Nasar is a Senior Lecturer in the History of Africa and its Diasporas at the University of Bristol. She is a social and cultural historian who works on histories of race, empire, and immigration. Committed to multi-archival and interdisciplinary research, her previous and future work contributes to developing comparative and interdisciplinary approaches in the fields of migration and imperial studies. Her first book (forthcoming) examines the transnational trajectories of Britain’s East African Asian population. She is currently leading a five-year Leverhulme Trust funded project on 'Welfare Citizenship and Intersectional Feminism'.
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