Whose Future(s)?
Juxtaposing birth futures from the global north and south presents opportunities for mutual learning across diverse contexts, challenging dominant narratives, and fostering solidarity and responsability towards more equitable visions. However, it also raises challenges in navigating power imbalances, centering marginalized voices, embracing pluriversality, and rejecting assumptions of linear progress or hierarchies of knowledge.
Rejecting Hierarchies
An important prerequisite for free imagination of the future is the tearing down of hierarchies and power dynamics, right from the start. The spaces, the artwork, the meditation and the sharing of personal stories all helped foster a deep sense of community and vulnerability, allowing for open dialogue and the emergence of meaningful narratives. We reminded participants to suspend judgment about
the superiority or inferiority of perspectives, but rather to respect each participant’s
visions within their contexts, and to embrace pluriversality - the coexistence of multiple valid ways of being and knowing.
Interrogating Power Imbalances
It remains crucial to critically examine the power dynamics and systemic inequities between communities in the global south and north that shape their narratives. The Dutch visions may reflect greater access to resources and technologiesl, influenced by colonial histories and neo-colonial structures, while Peruvian and Himalayan Indian stories emerge from realities marked by oppression, difficult terrain, climate change, and rural challenges. These contexts highlight the marginalization
of diverse midwifery knowledge systems. Decolonial practices that challenge eurocentric views and amplify diverse voices are essential for transformative, equitable reimagining of global birth care.
Intersectional Knowledges
Moreover, the Birth Futures workshops highlighted the need to embrace intersectional approaches that honor the complex, embodied knowledges emerging from intersections of race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender identity, ability, and other axes of oppression and privilege. This involves actively seeking
out and amplifying diverse intersectional perspectives, challenging monolithic narratives, and honoring the richness of lived experiences.
Embracing Pluritemporality
Lastly, the reflection made after one of the workshops that “one person’s future is another person’s present” underscores the importance of rejecting linear, Eurocentric notions of temporality and progress. Instead, it is crucial to recognize and embrace the pluritemporality of different communities, acknowledging their diverse temporal orientations and relationships to the past, present, and future – avoiding assumptions of linear progress and embracing the coexistence of multiple, equally valid temporal frameworks.
To conduct a meaningful cross-cultural dialogue, it is crucial to critically examine systemic inequities shaped by colonialism, amplify voices from the global south that have been historically neglected, and create spaces for the co-creation of knowledge that honors diverse epistemologies and lived experiences.