Dr Danielle Groleau

'Fluctuating  embodied experiences of breastfeeding: when social space, power, identity and services make a difference.'

In front of the irrefutable evidence for the benefits of breastfeeding, duration rates remain low in many western countries despite the desire of numerous mothers to breastfeed their infant. In a context of intensive promotion of breastfeeding, the spontaneous desire to ' do the best' for their infant motivates many mothers of the western world to adopt breastfeeding. However many abandon prematurely due to problems of accessibility to support and/or due to limits imposed by their social and public environments. This presentation will construct breastfeeding promotion as an objective of embodied cultural change and discuss how the post-structuralist concepts of habitus, field, symbolic capital and social capital can help more fully understanding the complexities of maternal embodied and emotional experiences as well as their empowerment and disempowerment experiences in various social spaces such as family, public space and health settings. The reflection presented will build from research projects completed in the Province of Quebec (Canada) and give examples with experiences of mothers of various clinical, social and cultural backgrounds including immigrant mothers, Canadian mothers living in poverty and mothers of various cultural origin that gave birth to low-birth-weight babies. We will also examined how mothers who used health services with a high level of implementation of the Baby- Friendly Initiative experienced breastfeeding services as a medicalisation-demedicalization process that changed their social space, by enhancing their social capital, and helped them negotiate the embodied experience of breastfeeding as a change in habitus.

Biography

Danielle Groleau (opens in a new window) is a medical anthropologist with a PhD in Public Health and post-doctoral training in Transcultural Psychiatry. She is an Associate Professor in the Division of Social and Transcultural Psychiatry at McGill University, and Senior Investigator at the Culture and Mental Health Research Unit of the Psychosocial Research Axis of the Lady Davis Institute. She is a Fond de Recherche en Sante du Quebec (FRSQ) Chercheur-Boursier Senior in the area of health and society. Dr. Groleau's expertise is in psycho-cultural determinants of health behavior, mainly in vulnerable populations. She teaches two courses in qualitative methods at McGill and has developed new qualitative interview tools designed to address knowledge translation of research results to public health stakeholders, while fostering a participatory approach to guide policy makers. She is internationally recognized as an expert in these areas, and has received numerous invitations from universities in Asia, Latin America, and Europe, as well as national and international agencies (World Health Organization, Pan-American Health Organization, and the government of Quebec), for consultation in research and policy.