Summative essay 2- plan
For my essay, I was thinking of using ideas from week 8 (risky and vulnerable bodies) and 10 (bodies as environments) to discuss the role of risk and epigenetics in expectant mothers who experience high-levels of stress during their pregnancy. The objective would be to discover how the stress that the mother embodies affects the infant. I was wondering if it would be a good idea to either make the stress I refer to in expectant mothers specific, for example, race-specific stress, or stress specific to individuals who have experienced natural disasters. Or, if I should keep ‘stress’ general throughout and perhaps use race or natural disasters.
The structure I am considering is as follows:
- Overview of ‘risk’ and ‘vulnerability’ and how it is relevant to health, bodies and embodiment in the modern day.
- How risk/vulnerability affects the experience of the pregnancy, i.e. higher concern. Here, I will use Lowe and Lee’s work (2010) and ideas from Lupton, e.g. “precious cargo” (2012). Especially regarding messages in the media.
- How risk is different for individuals of ethnic minorities, for it determines how bodies are responded to by health care services. Then, how black pregnant women experience more psychosocial stress, making their infants more vulnerable due to epigenetics. Will use works to support this such as “Effects of prenatal stress on pregnancy and human development: mechanisms and pathways” (Coussons-Read, 2013) and “Racial Disparities in Adverse Pregnancy Outcomes and Psychosocial Stress” (Grobman et al., 2013).
- Criticism of theories derived from epigenetic studies: many are carried out on mice, limiting the generalisability to humans. Also, many have been conducted on individuals subject to extreme levels of stress, such as in famine, as opposed to long-term, sustained stress e.g. race-specific stress.
Then considering ‘bodies as environments’ and building on epigenetics…
- I will use work from Weatherford-Darling et al (2016) to argue how bodies are materialised from social experiences, in this case, the prenatal stress inflicted on the infant can have medical and social implications on the child and that these impacts can last generations. I will use the rat study to help me illustrate this (Müller & Kenney, 2021). Although it reinforces how important the environment is, I will remain critical of its application to humans, as for example it was perceived that there are advantages of a greater level of stress, such as adaptability, which is perhaps more limited to rats.
- The experience of a black or expectant mother from an ethnic minority or who has had experiences of a natural disaster. Not sure on which yet. And then use the ideas from epigenetics and how our bodies are ‘permeable’ to our environments to discuss the exposure to stress (Weatherford-Darling et al., 2016).
