Learning to produce, see, and say the (ab)normal: professional vision in ultrasound scanning during pregnancy

Kerstin Sandell

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper, not in proceedingpeer-review

Abstract

This paper deals with midwives learning to do ultrasound scans in around week 17 of pregnancy and a central aspect of that learning: seeing and communicating the (ab)normal. It is an investigation into acquiring what Charles Goodwin refers to as a “professional vision” (1994) and into what that vision entails in terms of embodied skills. The focus is on “what we learn how to see” (Haraway 1991:190), or the structuring of embodied seeing in a medical practice.
The paper discusses the different parts of professional vision that Godwin points out: highlighting – in ultrasound that is the way in which deviances in the body of the foetus gets noticed by the midwives; coding – the way deviances are named; and material representations where the normal gets almost unrepresented but where there is a scopic focus on and interest in the deviant.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusPublished - 2010
EventXVII International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology - Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden
Duration: 2010 Jul 112010 Jul 17

Conference

ConferenceXVII International Sociological Association (ISA) World Congress of Sociology
Country/TerritorySweden
CityGothenburg
Period2010/07/112010/07/17

Subject classification (UKÄ)

  • Gender Studies

Free keywords

  • ultrasound
  • normal
  • pathological
  • practice
  • medicine
  • midwives

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'Learning to produce, see, and say the (ab)normal: professional vision in ultrasound scanning during pregnancy'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this