Too Much of A Good Thing?: American childbirth, intentional ignorance, and the boundaries of responsible knowledge
For the 2017 Mullins award the committee received a total of 18 papers. In terms of gender distribution, 10 out of the 18 papers were written by women PhD students. In relation to geographical diversity, 10 out of the 18 papers were from students based in the US, 3 were from the UK, 2 from Canada, 2 from India and 1 from South Korea.
The committee selected four criteria to evaluate the submitted pieces: contribution to the STS field, depth of research, writing quality and ethical/political relevance of the piece. Each aspect was scored from 1 to 5, with 5 the highest value. In addition, each paper was evaluated by three reviewers. After a first round of evaluation, we selected the three papers with the highest score and evaluated them again. The Committee wants to highlight the high quality of the contributions and the complexity of making a decision.
After reviewing the material the committee unanimously selected the paper entitled ‘Too Much of A Good Thing?: American childbirth, intentional ignorance, and the boundaries of responsible knowledge’ as the winner of the 2017 Mullins Award. The author of this piece is Kellie Owens, a student in the Sociology PhD Program at Northwestern University.
Drawing on the work of different STS scholars about risk and overtreatment, Owens provides an insightful analysis of risk in the case of fetal heart rate monitoring in childbirth in the United States. Childbirth provides an interesting case to understand the tensions between knowledge and ignorance in the management of risk in healthcare. She shows how, in this case, two models of health risk operate simultaneously: a model that values frequent intervention and another that aims to mitigate risk by refusing medical surveillance. This paper illustrates how health providers frame ‘intentional non-knowing’ as a moral imperative to reduce medical risk. Owens’ paper displays a delicate and integrated balance between a deep knowledge of STS literature, empirical analysis and theoretical inventiveness that makes it an outstanding academic contribution.
2017 Mullins Prize Committee: Oscar Maldonado, Linköping University, Sweden (Council Member) Sara Wylie, NortheasternUniversity, USA (Council member), and Monamie Bhadra Arizona State University, USA (2016 recipient)
I am honored to receive the 2017 Nicolas C. Mullins Award for my paper Too Much of a Good Thing? American Childbirth, Intentional Ignorance, and the Boundaries of Responsible Knowledge. I am grateful for the feedback I received on this project from Steven Epstein, Sheila Jasanoff, members of the Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern University, and members of the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard University. I also owe a great debt to the 4S community for fostering thought-provoking conversation as I presented this project in various stages.
Kellie Owens recently completed her doctorate in Sociology at Northwestern University. She was also a Fellow in the Science in Human Culture program at Northwestern and a Visiting Research Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology, and Society at Harvard. She will soon become a Postdoctoral Fellow in Advanced Biomedical Ethics in the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. Her research interests include the sociology of risk, knowledge, and medicine. Her dissertation explores variation in risk perceptions and practices in American childbirth.