CONTENTS: Page 1.....Reflection on reader 5. Pages 2-3.....Drawn birthing element material for animation experiment in After Effects. Page 4-5.....Continued Page 6-7.....Key frames images for birthing animation. Pages 8-9.....Reflection on drawings for animation frames. Pages 10-11.....Listening with Sophie Dougherty. Mother of 16 month triplets. Pages 12-13.....Continued. Page 14-15.....Pedagogic practice and practice based research- Re-Present project. Page 16-17.....Example of visualisation of a dissertation abstract. Pages 18-19.....Workshops to development of Level 6 Extended Practice Project. Page 20-21.....Talking with Georgina Moore, Level 6 student. Page 22-23.....Listening with Alys- fourteen weeks pregnant. Page 24-25......Continued. . Page 26-27.....BBC Women’s hour- Free birthing program December 2023 . Pages 28-29.....After Effects workshop with Nathan Ward. Page 30.....Angie Phillips reflection of her birth experience of Milo. Page 31.....Reader 4 feedback from Dr John Miers. Page 32......Tutorial notes and feedback from tutorial with Dr John Miers and Geoff Grandfield Page 33......Abstract submitted for Graphic Medicine Conference 2024
Reflections on Reader 5 In putting together the content for Reader Number Five, I have been looking at how to bring the elements of the animated key frames together in After Effects. I’ve had a lesson with Nathan Ward, which proved that the programme isn’t as natural as I thought it could be. However, the potential it has is enormous and very exciting. I’m fluent in Photoshop so that it will be one of those; you learn it because you’ve got the design problem you need to solve through it, in the way that I’ve learned InDesign through doing these readers. Frustratingly, my tutorial recording with him failed, so retrospectively, I realised that I could have made better notes. Anyway, I’ve gained the principles of how to set things up, how the program works fundamentally, and how it will allow me not to have to do necessarily monochromatic versions of something. The main essential thing is creating five different background boils of any flesh tone so that the animated subject has got a life to it, which I’m excited about exploring so that it doesn’t feel like someone is like a slab of marble that has got kind of no movability about that. From the tutorial with Geoff and John, it is interesting to see how we perceive moving images differently from static pictures and how we read them. So I think some research, quite rightly as John points out, where I’m looking at illustration, animation practice and the principles of that in how we understand what we’re looking at and what the intention of that visual material is for through the audiences that are exploring that. I’ve been thinking about the format of these short animated loops. So, the phone is an intended form I’m thinking of at the minute, but what comes to mind would be a landscape format. But, when thinking about the animation design with the fact that gravity is involved with a baby leaving a body, the portrait format may work better, which was a surprise. I’ve been talking and listening to women about their experience of ultrasound in pregnancy. She is talking to Alice about seeing her baby for the first time for the 12-week dating scan. She had an experience that was her second scan, whereas her first experience was the baby had no heartbeat. So she was talking about her anxieties around that. I’ve been talking to a mother of triplets, and the kind of shock of having three babies at once also brings the horrendous expense and how the government doesn’t offer any help.
I have been looking at my teaching practice and how that is feeding into this PhD research and vice versa. So, I’ve looked at two different examples. One is the Re-Present project, where students visualise their dissertation, so this form of the reader you’re reading now is very much in one version. Then the other one was how to enable students to establish the research subject area, the methodology, and the ways that they might develop that practice through making, drawing, film making, and animating. So through this series of workshops, these are on, in the middle of this publication, pages 16 to 21. I talked with a Level 6 student who particularly ran with this about how it helped her work out the territory of an extended project and why she was doing it in the first place. There have been exciting BBC women’s health programmes about free birthing and a new podcast called ‘Child’, which I will include in Reader Six. I have been reflecting with Angie about her birth experience of having Milo, how she’s normalised the outcomes from that and how we wouldn’t necessarily do that for other medical procedures. I’ve had great feedback from John and a tutorial with Geoff and John on the 15th of January 2024. I’ve begun to explore working in Mental Canvas, which will be in the next reader, a piece of software you can use to make 2D images into 3D environments so you can walk around it almost like you’re walking around a room. And then finally, I submitted an abstract to the Graphic Medicine Conference, which was an exciting way to think about how I can align what I’m doing with an area of image-making I don’t necessarily do, so how the reading list can be critical to talk about to comics or graphic narratives that other people have made about birth, but then thinking about the principles of this project and how they can be brought together to put together as an abstract. So, I’ve got quite a lot of material ready for reader number six. So, that’s where I am now—excited to crack on.
These are drawn elements from a birth film from Badassmotherbirther I have gathered ‘bits’ of baby positioning, gloves, positions of the gloved hands, waters, blood, Vernix caseosa, or vernix, is a white, sticky substance that covers your baby’s skin while in the womb. It acts as a natural moisturiser that helps protect the baby against infection in the first few days. I want to avoid the animation process of rotoscoping, where each frame is traced on a lightbox. This process is allowing me to develop the drawings from each other, frame by frame. I will put these togther in After Efffects. I have lessons booked.
These four pages of elements have provided the material to be able to join the jigsaw of components to create the birth sequence. The layers of hands and other fluids need working out - it’s in progress.
Reflections: The framing needs working out, when the baby extends from the birth canal- a zoom out will be needed - so I need to redraw the pelvis and legs so that the camera can pan out, as the baby is guided out and held and moved below the left leg.
Listening with Sophie Dougherty 09/10/23 I’m listening to Sophie here. And Sophie has got triplets that are 19 months old. So, you had your babies at Kingston? I did, yes. At 34 and 5 weeks, 24 hours before my planned C-section because my waters broke. That’s an outstanding amount of gestation time for triplets. Yes, so they don’t let you go over 35 weeks because there isn’t physically the room, and it’s quite dangerous to go in, but they want you to get as far as possible for the baby’s development and their weight. So, for about 24 weeks, they tell you to pack your bags and be ready if something happens. I had weekly check-ups to measure their growth and their position because I bled at 16 weeks, which was them moving. They turned into, they were in a triangle, and they moved to an upside-down triangle, which dislodged something, but we just thought the worst had happened. Oh, how terrifying. It was quite scary. And then, when they scanned me, they said, did you know there were three in there? And we were like, yes. Look at my notes. That’s unnerving. And yes, they were fine. So, what was your experience like? Can I ask you if you planned to have triplets, or what was the story behind you having triplets? No. So, at the end of 2020, we decided to try to have children, and I came off the pill; my periods didn’t come back, and the doctors said it’s just a delayed post-pill amenorrhoea sort of thing. It will return, and I said I didn’t think anything was wrong. I was like, this doesn’t feel right because I don’t feel any different having come off it, and I’ve been on the pill for ten years. So I asked my doctor to refer me to a gynaecologist privately in New Victoria, and I saw her. And she was called Rowena Bevan, and she was fantastic. She asked me a load of medical questions, and she asked my husband a load of medical questions; she said, I don’t think you have polycystic ovaries, but we need to rule it out, so I want you to go for an internal scan. I had the internal scan in January, and after about two weeks, I got my results, and they said that I did have polycystic ovaries. I had 19 on my left and 21 on my right, which was relatively high. And that was why I wasn’t releasing any eggs because they were just because they were polycystic.
They weren’t releasing any eggs. Therefore, I wasn’t having periods. Consequently, it was very hard to have a baby. So, the action plan was to put me on some medication. I took tablets. I can’t remember how many times a day. I think it was once or twice. And that was supposed to force ovulation, and I did that, started it, well was about to start it, it went into lockdown, and they closed fertility. So that got put on hold until just before the second lockdown when everything reopened, and they decided they could still do it, but you had to. I had to go to all my appointments independently, wear a mask, etc. So we tried the oral medication for two rounds. We upped my dose a second round, and it didn’t work. So, we then started with injections. So I would inject myself once a day in the evening at 6 o’clock, and I had to do that, and I would have me monitored weekly until my eggs were big enough. When I decided that my eggs were big enough, I would do a trigger injection, which you had to do 36 hours before the EUI. So my husband would have to go and get the sample, and they would clean it and remove all the seminal fluid. It was timed precisely so that I would then go to the hospital at 3 p.m., and they would inject it into me, which you can see on the screen, and then you just waited like you would for a normal pregnancy. So, you waited two weeks for the pregnancy test. If it failed, you had a period. If it didn’t fail, you do a pregnancy test, and you see what happens. The first time around, it failed; second time round, I got pregnant, and you then have to wait a good couple of weeks because you know you’re pregnant, you’re like, you’re literally two weeks pregnant, then you have to wait till you’re seven weeks for a scan. So you go and have an early scan. That must feel like a lifetime. It’s a long time because not only were we hiding that we were pregnant, but we’d also been hiding for two and a half years that we’d had fertility treatment. It was lockdown, so it was easier, but nobody knew we had problems. So the lying just carried on on the cover-up, plus you’re just so nervous because you’ve had so many failed rounds. So we went and had our 7-week scan at Kingston Hospital, and the lovely nurse scanned me, and it looked like she’d seen a ghost. And we went and got a doctor, and they just said we need to check that it’s not a quadruple pregnancy. Then they said no, there’s three, and they showed us. They’re like tiny jelly babies; I’ve got the video I can show you. And then they take you straight away and say this is a very high-risk pregnancy. You’ll be transferred now to the facility medical unit, and they will ask you to think about terminating and just be prepared for those conversations because it’s so high-risk for you and them. So we walked around in a daze for about a week and then just kept going to every appointment, and every time, they were very, very thorough.
I forget the name of the lovely doctor who was going to do my c-section when it was planned; and she was so thorough, and she was so lovely. Is she Susanna Pereria? Yes, that’s her! This Birth Stories PhD project came out of my meeting her before in 2020 She’s so fantastic. She’s brilliant. She was so calm. Any questions I have, she always lets me feel at ease. And in every scan, she would say, I’m going to do a CT scan, she always let me feel at ease. And in every scan, there were long appointments because you’re checking, particularly when they’re trying to measure them, and you’ve got to measure three babies, you need a double appointment. And Delilah, who was at the bottom, they quite often couldn’t see because she was so low down, so they tried to scan me internally, you know. But anyway, she was brilliant, and she was very, very sweet. In the end, the man who did my C-section was a charming man who, when we were checking my eggs to see if they were ready, said to me, I need to warn you that you’ve got two eggs that look very ripe and when you do your trigger injection, they might both release, and you have a chance of twins. And I said I have no reason to believe this will work. The first time we did this, I released two eggs, and it didn’t work, and he said that’s fine; I have to warn you. I released three, and they all fertilised, and he turned up at my C-section and went, “ oh dear, I warned you about twins, didn’t I? “ I said yes, but not triplets. Oh my god. But he was very sweet, and the C-section was seamless. Many people were in the room, but they all knew exactly what they were doing. And it was a science experiment because there were people there who had stayed on their ship. After all, they’d never seen triplets being born. But we were quite happy to have them there. I went in at 2 in the morning. My walls broke at 2, and I was in hospital by 3, because we had to pack our bags and we realised we got heart fatigue because we were without our medical notes and that was, we needed those. And they monitored me, so I had three heart rate monitors, one for me and one for the baby and another for two, because you’re only getting two at a time. Oh I’d only had paracetamol, but my contractions were getting quite strong. And by the point that they called it, I was, my contractions were a minute apart on two paracetamol. And they tried to see how dilated I was, and I literally nearly bit this woman. I was like, that really hurts. We need to go now. Yeah. So within, I think, 30 seconds, I was in a gown, Jay was in a gown, we were in a theatre coming.
They just appeared in the spinal block. And you know, it’s one of those things when they’re spraying you, like, can you feel it? And you’re like, I don’t know, maybe I can feel it. I feel like I can feel it; perhaps I can’t feel it. Yeah, it’s really bizarre. Gosh, and then they obviously went into the neonatal? Yes, all three of them went into the neonatal. So when they finished sewing me up, I went into recovery, and I said to Jamie, just go find them. Did you have to wait a while to get into a wheelchair? Yes, because I couldn’t feel my legs, and they couldn’t move me. So it was probably a couple of hours, and then I said, can I have some food because I hadn’t eaten? And I wanted some more paracetamol, and they lifted me into a chair, and they wheeled me into the neonatal. We did all the skinto-skin and kangaroo care and fed them. Then we got put on a ward because our room wasn’t ready, so they gave us a room because there were three of them, and literally 24 hours later, we got put into our room, and then we were given Delilah, so it was just us and her. And then, the following day, we had Henry, and then the next day, we got Otterley back because she had problems with breathing and regulating her temperature. And they kept coming in to check their temperature. And one of the times Jamie had gone home to sleep, they undressed them but didn’t redress them. I was left with three crying babies, and I couldn’t stand up, and I was like a midwife, and then I’m like, just the mum. And then Henry lost 9% of his body weight, so they told us we couldn’t send you home until he regained some weight, so we stayed for five days. Wow, that’s like nothing. Nothing, and he regained weight. Gosh my daughter was in the neo-natal for a month Yeah, he just, I mean, five days, that’s for triplets is unheard of. I don’t think they were expecting. No, that’s quite unbelievable. And I did ask the nice lady. I said, if the girls are okay and he’s not, will you split us up? And they said we’ll try not to. Yes. And they kept us there till the Saturday, and he regained weight. And so they discharged us Saturday evening. And we went home, and then we had a very lovely midwife whose name escapes me. What support did you have? I mean that you were outnumbered with those three babies straight away. Nikki, Nikki, the midwife at Kingston Hospital, was fantastic, so she said to me I can send somebody else, or I can come, and I said I want you to go, and she was brilliant; she answered every single question. So, support-wise, my mum and dad and Jamie’s mum unfor-
So, after my husband had two weeks of maternity leave, which is loads, isn’t it? You’ve had premature babies and have you seen that they’re trying to get that petition through that if you’ve had babies in the neonatal unit you get that back at the end of your maternity leave. So you should. As it’s not maternity leave. No, that’s true. It’s gone to the House of Lords or whatever it needs because so many people petitioned against it. I think that’s important. My husband’s from Norway, where you, as a couple, get 18 months, but you can share it. Which is great, and that’s just with just one child, and I’m sure if you had twins, you’d get more. Yes. Or triplets. But it shows you how absolutely appalling, you know, the British support system for new mothers is. It is. It’s disgusting. If you get twins in, I think it’s New Zealand; they send someone to live at your house to help you. Oh my God. Yes - all being fine unless you don’t like them. Yeah, quite. Or if it was a thief or something. So after that, them being tiny and, their newborn and prems, we fed them every three hours. I expressed for seven weeks to get them as many calories as possible. And we just mixed the formula and the breast milk together. So my mum and dad used to come up at half past seven every morning and leave about four o’clock every night or quarter to five, which was their last feed because you can feed two, but you can’t feed three simultaneously. So, well, you can do two feeds at the same time, then when the first one is finished, you don’t start feeding the third, but it’s complicated to burp them, etc. So they would come and be with me all day, every day. My husband, luckily, is a primary school teacher, so he gets a lot of holidays, half-terms, some holidays, etc. And then our friends were great. I think many of them don’t have children but understood, or maybe had, you know, siblings that had children, and understood how stressful it was. And we had people sending nappies to our house, you know. It must have been hugely expensive. Yeah, so we went through 180 nappies a week. Wow. Yeah, we didn’t buy Pampers because it wasn’t worth it. And everyone’s like, you should have Pampers, they’re the best. I was like, are they? No. We bought Lidl. Did you get any sponsorship?
So, I set up an Instagram called Once, Twice, Three Times a Baby. And I tried to do the whole Instagram thing and get deals and brand deals. I got an awful lot of crap and spam. Right. We got approached by the Daily Mail. Yeah. And we did a photo shoot at the Daily Mail. And that was £200 for the shoot, which they paid us for and never published, which is fine because we got paid.
unded. So they base it on those calculations, in which case it’s still like two grand a month.
And then you don’t have to be associated with the Daily Mail, so it’s probably quite a good thing.
So, some nurseries like Bright Horizons don’t do a sibling discount. And so I said, well, do you do a triplet discount? And they said no. And I said, right, okay, that doesn’t help me.
Absolutely. The journalist who did the story on us said that the Mirror wanted to publish it, and I said no thank you. Let me see if I can find the photos. So I tried to get sponsorship, and I tried to get brand deals, but it’s arduous work to get those things, and it’s like a full-time job to be an Instagrammer, and there were a couple of triplet Instagrammers that I followed. If we had to feed the babies at night, that was fine, but Jamie had to feed two because I had to go and express. So, then that’s hard on him; it’s just the sound of the breastfeeding machine, the express machine, just used to do me in. I’ve just told Kim she’s just had a baby, and I’ve just told her to get the Medela expressing machine because they were brilliant and you could rent them for a month. Right. So you could do it monthby-month, and it didn’t cost you a fortune. Child care is costly. So your parents look after them?
That’s ridiculous isn’t it? It’s just an absurdly really large amount of money for two days a week. Yes.
Because it’s just like so not thought through. No. And there’s no support for parents with multiples at all. There’s no funding. There’s no help. Unless you’re not working on benefits, I think they give you a grant of 1,000 pounds, which doesn’t get you that far but helps. Obviously, we got ourselves into this pickle, but we didn’t choose to have three babies. It happened, and we decided to go through with it because I couldn’t possibly have to make that decision, especially if they were all healthy. I always told them that if one of them was unwell or it would affect me, we’d make that decision. Yes, I believe you can have something complex-like twin to twin syndrome.
Yes, so my parents, God bless them, my dad’s 68 next year. They have my children from quarter past seven in the morning to half past five, four days a week.
Yeah, because that can happen. But there’s nothing, and it’s hard. And we now have babies that have, you know, eat a banana, a satsuma, a punnet of blueberries and 12 Weetabix just for breakfast.
They sound excellent.
Wow. Just for breakfast!
They are excellent. I started doing four days a week and then upped it to four and a half days a week because my job’s quite difficult and demanding. I was doing the extra hours. I would if I could do five and four, but it just wouldn’t pick up. It doesn’t work. So we have been looking at the 15-hour government-funded new scheme coming in April, except it’s not free. The childcare is free, but the food, the nappies and the activities aren’t. So we’ve made a few nurseries, all of which come out about, for two days a week, about £1000 a child.
That would last an average child over a week.
Oh my goodness. Yeah, because they have a minimum of two days. Is that a month? Yeah, it’s nearly three grand a month, which we don’t have spare. And many of them don’t know what the government-funded 15 hours looks like, so they’re basing that on what it would cost without the funding. And sometimes they base their calculations on if you’re on benefits, you get the 15-hour
And they’re eating that in a day. There’s nothing, no support so we just have to get on with it. Have you had any support through charities like Tamba? So we joined Twins Trust, and we did; I mean, I’ve joined some stuff, but a lot we know, a lot of it is, have this discount code for Clarkes. Great. 20% off. Wonderful. It’s not helping me when it costs me, you know, £300 for boots and trainers. And that’s just going to get worse. Yeah. Yeah. God. Yeah. You may need to win the lottery. I do. Or go on OnlyFans. I think you’d do totally alright on OnlyFans.
I think I would as well, Or Feetfinder or something, some weird foot fetish. So what was the worst thing about having triplets? Being terrified the entire time that they weren’t going to make it. And also the fact that you’re never going to be able to buy yourself anything nice. No, true, but being terrified from two weeks until 34 weeks and five days. Obviously, you have to ensure every day that not one baby is kicking and moving, but all three are. And sometimes, if I was working and I wasn’t paying attention, I might get to three o’clock in the afternoon and go, has anybody moved? Yeah. Because I’m not paying attention. Yeah. The best bit about it was actually that, you know, Lydia and Mandy were extremely supportive. It was during COVID, and it was a peculiar time. Should you get vaccinated if you’re pregnant? Shouldn’t you get vaccinated if you’re pregnant? So, they just decided that I wouldn’t come to campus. Yeah, and I didn’t get COVID while I was pregnant. We did get it when the kids were seven months old, and it was potentially the worst two weeks of my life. It was the fear, the fear about something going wrong with me, and it’s like the fear about something going wrong with them and not knowing what would happen once they were born because some babies are in there for months, and they can get split up. There was a couple in there that we did NCT online with, and they had twins; one was at Kingston, and one was at St George’s, and they spent their time splitting up going to see two different babies, which was my nightmare. And then after they’re born, you’re just worried that they’re not okay, so I remember worrying about their temperature because if they got too cold, they’d lose weight, you know, whose weight because they’re burning energy. Yeah. Um, I think that was it. And then because it was still significantly heightened COVID, obviously people wanted to visit, and I’d be like, you need to lateral flow, you need to wash your hands before you come in, and you need not to kiss my children. I’m trying to explain that to people who had babies 30 years ago. They’re like, oh, it’ll be fine. It’s like, no, please don’t. Or even just strangers do it now. They touch my children. Yeah. Please do not at all touch my children.
Mine in Tesco the other day just started grabbing one of my kids. I was like please don’t touch her. I don’t know where you come from. So do you feel, I mean you must get a lot of attention everywhere you go? You can’t walk down anywhere. We’ve got a Wanderfold wagon, which is like a four-seater wagon, which they stand up in, like a roof canopy, and obviously, that in itself attracts attention. So everywhere we go, we get, are they all yours? Are they triplets? Are they identical? Have you got three boys? Are they two girls with boys? Which makes me want to punch them in the face. Even if they’ve got pink coats on, we still get, are they three boys? That’s strange. Very peculiar. The usual etiquette is what are their names or, you know, never mind. So we do attract an awful lot of attention, and the majority of the time, it’s, oh, you’ve got your hands full, which is just annoying because yes, that’s obvious, I do, and you’re not helping. I just, the lack of time that we have. By the time we got in, bathed them, put them to bed, come back down, tidied it up, and packed their food for the next day because they don’t go to the nursery, so we have to make all of their meals. And then pack their clothes for the next day, spare the set, and have by 7 or 8 to do it. And then the washing? So, regarding the washing, I think we need to invest in industrial-sized hotel washing machines because I think I could probably do two to three wash loads daily. I don’t, but then I could do five wash loads on a Saturday, and then it’s everywhere trying to dry it. In the summer it was great, in the winter it’s not so good. The bedding, the towels, everything. It’s easier now they’re older because they’re only in one set of clothes. When they were babies it could have been two, three, or four sets of clothes daily. And that was tough because it’s just the admin and then the housework Life admin. It is. I quite often say to everyone, you know, by the time I’ve got here, I’ve been up since half past four, I’ve had a coffee, I’ve tried to exercise, I’ve got dressed, I’ve then got the kids up, they’ve had to have a snack or a bottle, you know, back in the day. I’ve then driven to my mum and dad’s, .
unpacked them all, put their breakfast in front of them, left, got on the train, got here, sat down, done a full day’s work, got back on the train, got to mum and dad’s, picked them up, take them home, bath, bed, reset. Wow. And then I got to try and, you know, be a nice human, remember everyone’s birthday, buy everyone a present, speak to my mother-in-law, speak to all my friends, book it when I’m going to see them, do a food shop, clean the house, make sure everyone’s got clean clothes, and try not to have a mental breakdown. But then I’m sure all mothers feel that way, it’s not just me. Well, I think you’ve got, like, twice, three reasons. I think it’s all the micro-stresses. So if one cries, the other one cries, the other one, you know, if someone’s sitting on somebody’s head, you know. It’s all the micro-stresses that build up. Whereas if you’ve just got one, you’re also not outnumbered. Yeah, it’s the outnumbered thing that I think does us in because I can’t just walk to the park with them because I have three of them, and they may run in different directions, and that’s dangerous. Two of us can take them to the park, but when I’m on my own again on a Thursday, I’m limited in what I can do regarding safety.
set you up for success. Once the midwife signed me off and they were happy with the babies, I felt safe that they were such a comfort and that I felt safe in their hands I’m delighted that you had excellent care. Makes me want to cry a little bit. Yeah, they were fantastic. Because I don’t think that care is the same in many places. It probably isn’t. When people asked me why I had them at Kingston, I said, well, they have a particular multiple birth unit, and I cannot fault them. Many of my friends are pregnant now and all at Kingston. They’ve had very similar responses. They’re like, yeah, they’ve been fantastic. And I can’t fault it. And then, when the kids were maybe nine or ten months, I did the Richmond half marathon and raised £1,500 for the Born To Soon Charity. And I asked them if they could send me a t-shirt, and they did, and I did the GoFundMe thing, and because I was like, I know how I looked into how expensive the equipment is realised that even in six days we were there for three babies that probably cost hundreds of thousands of pounds. Yes, it’s unbelievable. Thanks, Sophie. It’s been incredible listening to you.
I feel bad for asking for any of your time.
Your welcome, I better get on with these HPL’s
At least I’m not doing HPL’s. Yeah, but Kingston were great, and they
Before doing all the other million tasks you have after.
Pedagogic Practice and Practice-Based Research. I am fortunate to have extensive teaching experience before undertaking my PhD project. After building the initial methods and approaches during the first year of my course, I have looked at the range of projects I have designed within the Level 6 curriculum and which approaches I can apply to my Practice-Based research. This ‘Reader’ you are experiencing digitally or physically is based on a project called ‘Re-Present.’ This project is designed for students to understand the relationship between their studio practice and their academic writing for their dissertation. Whilst becoming an expert in their question for their level 6 essay, we ask the students to consider what this research can look like visually. The project is presented in four categories or briefs. These slides illustrate these approaches; I have chosen brief number two within my research practice. -The ‘Illustrated Reader.’ The premise is that the project or the stage can be passed on to the supervisor, other stakeholder, or party who may want to engage with the project. The additional benefit I have found from working with these publications is being able to look back to look forward, keep abreast of what I am covering, what I need to revisit, and which first building points need expansion.
As a pedagogic activity, students can initially be tentative and anxious about visually realising their dissertation. It could be a small section, two opinions, a methodology or a performative element that is documented. We start the project with focused workshops to determine how to talk about your questions out loud. How to build a 200 hundred word abstract: this abstract is taken through a process of highlighting 24 keywords. These are then boiled down to 9 words, which the students respond to visually in a pictorial form. This ‘safe-space’ workshop allows students to abandon judgment as a onehour time constraint is just that, and you aren’t going to create the most fantastic work in that time frame. Having a set of immediate visuals instils confidence in the student, and they can then expand this method to one of the briefs and test their abstract in a broader form. Making a visual version of their academic writing helps students work out the overarching structure, or in many cases a specific question, argument or comparison within their writing. It provides them with a place to test and start the research. Or, as I am practicing - a visual repository.
Image courtesy of Rose Windsor Walker
In engaging with the highlighting and blocking out the process of the workshop sheet titled. ‘Me and my practice- I want to know about what interests me, my practice and ambitions. About What/ Why? How / Who with? What / Who For? What does the project form take, project type, subject matter, working methods, intentions, why now, working with others? Establishing some - not all of these questions at the start of the project can confirm what you want to take off and leave on the table for your research project.
The Extended Practice Project Proposal Within the curriculum, we always look at ways for students to maximise their learning potential. The Extended Practice Project is an opportunity for students to work on an extensive 11-week research-led project to develop the breadth and depth of their practice. We encourage students to link with their academic practice and utilise their research for their dissection and Re-Present project. This year, we have briefed it earlier in the year, and I have designed a series of workshops to help students establish the content of what they propose to work on
after the Christmas break and the handin of their dissertation. On the previous pages are the sheets directing the students’ interests. Feedback from dyslexic students who find writing their intentions from scratch found the editing worksheet ‘Me and my practice’ helpful in the way they could highlight and edit - the parts of their practice they wish to build upon and the aspects that they want to move on from.
Images courtesy of Georgina Moore
I’m talking with Georgina Moore, one of my Level 6 students. We brought the extended practice project forward a little earlier this year. To help students set up and establish their project and its potential. We’ve done a series of different workshops. And I’m asking her opinion because she has really run with the intention of them. In this verso page, you can see her material and how she translated it. So, first of all, we provided you with a worksheet that was quite a scatter-gun information grab after we briefed the year about what the ‘Extended Practice project’ content and details. This first worksheets language was represented an A3 sheet of Post-it notes (far top left.) It covered things like the student’s name and project time frame. Then, we look at working methods, audiences, resources, specific challenges, ethical considerations and why the project is important to the student. How did that work for you, Georgina? Because the boxes and the Post-it notes had different prompts and questions, which immediately highlighted where I did have ideas and where I didn’t, it showed where the weak spots even represented. I can see three empty boxes there, but that’s great. The next thing we asked you to do was think about putting them in terms of imagery. So, three images explored the context, methodology, and visual experiments. I took the number three quite loosely. I’ve included a few more than three, Was it helpful to have those in a visual form? A reflection period has been interesting, which is helpful at the start of a project. As you know what you’re making stuff about and what your work is, but having it visually collaged together and picking different parts that you think will then work for another project sort of puts you on a track to think that you already know how you work and how you work in that way, so what things you’ve done before you can now apply. Or things you’ve done before that you never want to do again. So then what we did in the next workshop, we asked you to bring that visual and then begin to amalgamate those twelve images into four different. Then, we provided you with three writing pieces as an editing exercise. These covered 1. About what and why? 2. How and who with? 3. What and who for? This exercise focused on highlighting what you are interested in and striking out not wanting to do. Yeah, it was beneficial at the beginning of the project.
Yes, I don’t know if it was that sheet or the sheet after, but it again highlighted the parts I may still need to learn. What do I need clarification on? Because I was very sure about the format. I always found what I wanted to make, but what I wanted to know about was much more complicated. So, the content of it? Yes. That’s why I chose illustration, not fine art. Exactly. So the form is the vehicle, and the content is where you work out who’s in the vehicle, where you will travel, and what you will do when you get there. Lovely answer. Next, we asked you to take that list of things you’d edited down and then put them into a ‘shopping list.’ So me and my practice, I want to know more about what interests me, my practice and my creative ambitions, and then think in these three different forms. So my what and who for box is still completely empty because that varies depending on the content. But that helps me narrow it down to those three subjects, helps me narrow it down to themes about what. I already have themes that I’m interested in. I have these themes in nature, family, queerness, nostalgia/ emotion.
you’ve made to show for what you’ve done, or if the things I’ve made are physical, they’re not... Yes, they’re not in front of you. Yeah, so they’re not all in one place. It’s helped me to have all this thinking in my page-turning manageable process. So I’ve got them somewhere because I’ve done all these things. Fantastic. So if they’re visual and in a book form in front of you, there’s evidence that you’ve done that, as well as visual prompts for you to look backwards to look forwards. Which project did you do for the Represent one? Which one did you choose out of the four? The Body of Practice. To embody your project through a making process, so to document the process and reflect on it. So, making it a physical thing. Which I found difficult. I was quite scattered in that project.
Super.
But you’ve presented this one in the form of an illustrated reader, something you can pass onto the next person - and they can access and understand your project.
And then what was the last thing we got to do?
Yeah, I’ve read without even really reading. So it’s interesting that that way of thinking,
It was to then think about these six boxes. From the last workshop is the development of my proposal. At this stage, there could be more than one option for each. So project type, subject matter, methods, working with others, audience, users and outcomes. And we were trying to encourage people to draw things. And then the final one was a discussion where you talk to your peers, where you’re getting used to presenting that.
Even though you didn’t choose to do that for the dissertation project, you’ve adopted that for this?
Yes, I plan to redo that because I am visualising that again on top. Beyond what I would typically do, these things have been helpful because I’ve been representing this entire project in InDesign. So, even putting images into the boxes, it zooms in and focuses on something you might have yet to consider. And it’s, well, that’s now part of my process. Because I’ve put it into this thing, that’s made it something new. But what was interesting about you is how you’ve compiled it into a book. And why have you chosen to work with that format? That was to keep my thought process. Yes, perfect. Linear and making sense. I find idea projects like this require a lot of thinking, gathering, collating, and collecting; it can make me very scattered and confused and like I lose my way a bit. I don’t know. When you don’t have things
Yeah, it’s made me want to redo that project as well because I’m not very happy with that project because I was very lost for about half of it, Suddenly, it was like, oh, I’ve got to redo it. They’re all short projects at this stage to get you thinking and warmed up so that by the time, the reason we brought this forward is so that you don’t creatively go relatively flat while you’re writing your dissertation and that level of making and articulating through your visuals, but also acknowledging the amount of stuff or the amount of material that you’ve made, because it’s very easy to forget, isn’t it? Or forget what you did last year or forget what you’ve done. Especially as I have gone from mainly doing illustration to making films this year, I wouldn’t go as far as to say animation, but to making film. It is very much like that. With illustration, you have a collection of drawings of everything you’ve made, and you can see it all in front of you. When you’re making things through a process that’s essentially sound or video, it’s hidden away in a folder, and you can’t tell you’ve done this backlog. Or you may have done it in three different
parts, and it isn’t easy to think about how to join those up. That’s been an exciting navigation of how to present my process and how to think about things. Did you want to talk about how I’ve done that as well? Yes, so you’ve also done another little exercise that you said was from your foundation: navigating your way through a hundred things you’re interested in. I was writing what hundred influences you have in your work, so books, films, TV shows, artists, anything that is coming to mind and that has influenced you recently. And what was at the top of the list? Absolutely nothing. I left number one blank. Ah, what was number two? That’s the thing: I didn’t start writing at number two, either. Oh, where did you start? In the middle? Oh, fantastic. That’s interesting. And number one’s still empty. I still did it in a very scattered jigsaw way because I didn’t want it to feel like it was forced into this important thing, the least important thing. That’s a much better way of doing it, so you don’t run out of steam after ten. Yeah. And I didn’t notice I had left number one empty until the end. Oh, that’s great, Georgina. The next iteration, which you edited, looks a bit like a ransom note! Oh dear, yes, it does. It would be great to have a copy if you wouldn’t mind. This information will be in the next printed publication. With the 100 words- well the ones left then I annotated about what and why. Because of the things that are there, those will be in the project. So I’m still narrowing in on the story, but there’s been, I wouldn’t even say there have been decisions made; it’s like decisions have been eliminated through all these different processes that started with the first workshop. That’s perfect, thank you very much. And I’ve included your imagery in my number 5. Looks nice. Thanks for your contribution and time. No worries, I am happy to help.. Thanks Georgina, See you in a bit. Bye - see you later.
Notes from a catch up meeting with Dr Kate Scott regarding ethics.
Listening with Alice Hello, it’s the 16th of November 2023. I’m here and talking and listening with Alice; Who is how many weeks pregnant?
is crazy. I think the baby was probably asleep at the time of my last pregnancy, but this one was much more active. And so it was like jumping around and all that stuff.
I am fourteen weeks pregnant.
Fantastic.
Fourteen weeks, that’s exciting.
Yeah, so it was nice to see that. And the technician was like, oh, everything’s fine, everything’s healthy,
It’s exciting, it’s unbelievable. Is it going quickly? Yes, yes, you’re telling me! So, Alice, you have just had your 12-week scan. I have. And where was that? That was at Kingston Hospital, at the maternity unit. How was it? It was interesting, yeah. It was great. So I don’t know how candid you want me to be for these things, but I’ve had one before for a previous baby. So it wasn’t the first time. Oh, that makes it a very different experience. Yeah, yeah, it does. That disqualifies me from this conversation. Absolutely not; it makes it even more relevant in the kind of baggage that we take into these spaces. And the fact that, so, yes, did you go in there with a level of anxiety? Yes, I was really scared actually because, yeah, I didn’t know how I was going to react. I might have a breakdown or something because it’s the first time that I saw my first history, my first pregnancy, that was like two years ago, two and a half years ago, and yeah, so a lot of the things I haven’t dealt with back then kind of all came back up. I was like, is this going to be a horrible moment? Am I just going to be a flood of tears? Is the technician going to have to hold me down? And I was like, I don’t know what would happen. But it was okay. And I went into the room, and I saw the baby. And I spent this whole pregnancy kind of thinking, I’m not sure what I’m going to feel like when I see the baby. Then, when I saw it, I was like, this is a little thing, so sweet. Do you feel more connected to the baby now you’ve seen the baby? Yes, it still doesn’t feel very real, though, like it’s starting to become this picture in my mind of, oh wow yeah, this is happening. And, like, seeing the baby move
I’m assuming that the visuals of an ultrasound scan have improved in 18 years. So, was it nice and clear?
Yes. So I realized that that’s what was triggering the nausea and everything. It wasn’t pleasant. It still comes and goes, now and again, I have like a little bit of waves of nausea, but it’s nothing like it was telling my Husband I don’t know if I can do this because it’s just so, so awful. I know some women really suffer, don’t they?
Absolutely!
It’s difficult in the whole premise of having to keep a pregnancy quiet at the beginning. It’s complicated when you feel so unwell.
Or was it still that pretty grainy aesthetic?
Yes.- All this new stuff to navigate.
It was clear. Yeah, definitely. The colour differed from the one I went with in the previous scan. Yeah, and I could see straight through; you could see all the different body parts. The sonographer was saying, I can see the heart, here’s the stomach, you can see that the kidneys are working and all that kind of stuff. And I was like, wow! It was still quite blurry and hard to make out, but she knew what she was looking at, and I was asking her to explain that to me one more time. She was like, there’s a hand, it looks like a nugget, but it’s a hand, and I was like, oh, okay, sure, I’ll take that.
Yes, I told my dad when we found out at four or five weeks. We were excited. And he was just like, why are you telling me now? You’re supposed not to tell anyone until you’re 12 weeks. I felt like saying- Oh, thanks for that support.
It’s so incredible, isn’t it, that in just 14 weeks, you can go from being an egg into a moving, little tiny person Yes, really extraordinary. Have you felt any quickenings yet? I did last night, actually! Oh, amazing! I did, yeah. I was like, I’m really tired from work, I was miserable, so I was lying down in bed, and just like in the dark room, and I felt this thing, it’s like a boop boop boop, going inside, like a little kind of thing, and I was like, that’s not anything I’ve ever felt before, and it has to be baby. It was weird. And it’s starting to hit now that it’s like, oh yeah, there is a baby inside. Are you now in your second trimester and feeling a bit better? I don’t know how anyone functions. Yeah, you feel pretty rotten, don’t you? In week seven, just before coming here to return from Hong Kong, I didn’t think I could get on a plane. I was so sick. I was really, really unwell. And it was to the point where I couldn’t get out of bed. I was dry-heaving all the time. Every time I opened the fridge, I thought I was going to throw up. I did throw up, which is quite rare for me, so it was brutal. I had to take medication to stop the nausea itself. And then I was taking omeprazole, which is like a PGI, to stop the stomach acid.
Yes, he could have been a bit excited for you. Maybe he felt that that reaction was appropriate in protecting you. Yeah maybe. What form are your notes in? Are they digital, or do you have that pack you have to lug around with you? I have my pack. Interesting, that this information is still not digital in 2023. When I was pregnant last time, I never got that kind of stuff. It was very different. Was that because you were in Hong Kong at that time? Yes, so it was very different. Here it’s this big pack you carry around; you’ve got all these forms and records. You can look at yourself. It’s nice because I get to see all these things that don’t feel like it’s for me. Yes. I’m carrying around this big file for everyone else for their convenience. . Yes, I’d like to see if the visual language of that has changed. I’ve got one from KMU pre-Covid, and it has some sparse, appalling drawings. I’d like to see how they’ve updated it. It doesn’t look too bad, and it’s all very like corporate, you know, what do they call that, like corporate functional design. Yes It’s very toned down and very simple. There are not too many drawings, and it’s just lots of smiling pregnant women with closed smiling eyes.
That’s an entirely different visual from dry retching into your handbag. Holding this sort of watermelon, everyone’s wearing pastel clothes. No one looks knackered, and no one seems like they’ve got covered in spots. Oh god, yeah, something about the spots. Yeah, like everyone’s having a lovely time, having a cup of tea. Is that a good thing? Because that doesn’t connect with the reality of how it feels, especially in the early stages of pregnancy. Looking at all of these pictures, you’re like, I’m not there yet. I’m here in this weird space where I can’t even tell that there is a baby. I feel awful all the time with nothing showing. I put on 7 or 8 kilos in a space of a couple of weeks. It instantly blew up with no one asking- is this normal? And I keep reading online about how, like, oh, you might lose weight in the first trimester. And I’m just like, fuck off, fuck off. Don’t tell me that I’m doing my pregnancy wrong already. You know, it’s only been a couple of weeks. So, do you feel judged? Yes, completely- you’re presented with all these women with their big bellies hands around them. I’m reading a passage from Shiela Kitzinger’s book called Rediscovering Birth-to only understand birth from a Western perspective. “In all the industrial societies today, when a woman gets pregnant, she may be presented with various options. Yet, if she’s having her first baby, she only has a vague idea of how birth really feels and how other women cope. Birth is set apart from the rest of women’s lives and accepted as a matter of specialist knowledge. Because our culture of childbirth is intensely medicalised, choices are polarized to have an epidural or to manage without one, to have painkillers, to agree to electronic fetal monitoring, or to refuse it, or to decide on a C-section, or deliver vaginally, or to put the complete trust in the obstetrician or summon up the courage to do it on your terms.” I shared with you that PDF about trying to advocate for your choice. So would you agree with that? I feel like, at the beginning, you have to figure it out a lot yourself. Do you have a midwife yet? I do have a midwife. I don’t know. She was nice and very friendly and stuff. But much of the conversation when I asked questions felt shelved - we’ll deal with that later. I was just like, okay, cool. You know, I felt - let’s wait, and we’ll see whether or not you continue to be pregnant for the
next couple of weeks. It’s just like, you know, you’re on your own until we have the scan, and then you come back, and then you’re on your own again until you’ve had the anatomy scan. So it’s like, I don’t know what’s happening. Do you think scanning is vital in feeling connected? I think so. Waiting 12 weeks is a long time. And there’s a lot of if it doesn’t happen during that time, there’s nothing we can do. And it’s like, yeah, those 12 weeks of going, like, every time I went to the toilet, just checking my pants, making sure I haven’t had a miscarriage. I would have liked a scan at nine or ten weeks. It does feel like a long time. If you were a private patient, there would probably be more options and opportunities to see your baby in utero. I think so. I don’t know. So, you’ve got your next 20-week one coming up. Yes, you know, what if I do something wrong? I can’t do anything about it. There’s a lot of surrendering to that. If there is, there are many ways that they can fix things. Really? Yes -have you been encouraged to think about a birth plan when it’s still early? Not really by anyone. It’s something that I’ve been thinking about. I am still trying to figure out what I want. And the reality of what it will be like has yet to sink in. When you sent that PDF, I thought, oh yeah, this is a big deal. I should start thinking about this. Yes. I believe women are only given that information if you’re looking for it. And I thought I was reasonably well informed but was so ignorant. I feel like nobody’s told me anything still, and it’s like a secret club; you have to knock three times to get in. Even if you ask, it’s all these cute, bubbly solicitations you may have some discomfort. So you feel that there is a ‘gatekeeping’ of knowledge? Yeah, That’s interesting. Every time I go on any website, it’s just like this cutesy kind of like, your baby’s this size and this fruit, and it’s like, give it to me straight! I don’t want to see what fruit it is, I want to know, is what I’m going through normal? There’s so many aches and pains that I have, and I’m just like, I guess it’s okay, I don’t know, I feel like we have to
put up with so much as women in general, like if you have a migraine, they’re like, oh that’s just your hormones. And now it’s like the same thing again, like with pregnancy, it’s just your pregnancy, it’s just like, okay. Every pregnancy is a different story, and I think it is essential that people talk about the positives and the fact that it’s a big deal to get a baby out of your body. And the more empowered and knowledgeable you can feel about that. So, just in terms of looking at birthing experiences, I gave you the link to that badass mother-birther. Did you have a look at it? I did, yeah. Watching someone’s body prepare is incredible; you don’t need to push. Your body does it for you but because we’ve got this very skewed sense of what that birth looks. We have references such as in One Born Every Minute, where we are presented with women often strapped down and just screaming their heads off and shouting, push! It’ll be great to catch up with you again after your 20-week scan. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I’ll have to be a Zoom call. Yeah, absolutely, and completely. It’s all on your terms. Great, I haven’t bought any books for you. I will remember - sorry! My friend recently had a baby, and she was telling me all about tears and stuff, that they are graded! Yes, they certainly are. What? They call it a mycopalene? Poldropoles? No, Poldropoles? I’m not sure. If you give birth too quickly, tears can be bad, but some tears heal much better than an episiotomy because of the stitching. So you’re having your baby in Hong Kong, aren’t you? Yes, I am. I’m pretty scared about that, to be honest. In what way? Just the approaches there because I’m going to go to a public hospital as well, and there’s a huge disparity between public and private in Hong Kong compared to here. You still get decent care. Hong Kong’s got good medical care, but it’s ‘rough,’ if that’s a word. There’s no thrills. They won’t be there holding your hand and being, well done, mummy. They’re just going to be like, do this and this now. Do you think that’s because of the amount of women going through the system? There is a little bit of that.
Or do you think it’s a cultural thing? A little bit of that. Definitely. If you want that kind of coddling care in Hong Kong, you have to pay to go to the private hospital. And there’s like some famous ones, like Matilda Hospital, where they’re like renowned, world-renowned for how beautiful it is. Like you’re on the top of this mountain, you have this beautiful view, and you have a private room, and you’ve got ten nurses all surrounding you helping you give birth, and all this lovely stuff, right? And you have in the hospital, you can order in food, and they’ll bring you dine in, and all this kind of stuff. It’s like being in a hotel to have a baby. And then you’ve got the public hospital, which you’re in a ward with like ten other women, and then you’re labouring, and you all labour in one room. Then, once it gets into the last hour, they’ll move you into the delivery room, where your husband can come in to watch the baby being born. I’m not sure if he’s... I need to double-check that this is what I remember from reading, so my facts could be way off, but I can send you a link on giving birth in public hospitals, I was reading about that. I would love that. When you have the baby, it’s bye, bye husband, and then you get carted off into the post-recovery room where you’re stuck with all these other women. The nurses will come in every hour, check on you, are you alright, time to feed, then they wrap up the baby, and yeah, put them on the thing beside you. You’re in there for 24 hours and then you’re out. Gosh, sounds very conveyor belt-esque. It is! It’s going through a factory, a big factory. Yes- absolutely no hand-holding. And half of the staff probably don’t speak English very well. Hong Kong is renowned for, I think 90% of the population speaks English. But to what degree? It depends. So you might have some people who shout at you directly, just like, baby now! And you’re like, okay, I guess I’m getting my tits out, sure. It’s that feeling that your body is not yours and others have agency over it. They’re going to tell me what to do. The whole premise is that when you go into a hospital, you give up your clothes, so you give up your identity, and you’re put into a gown that looks like all the other women in a gown. My skin colour will separate me. That’s the other thing as well. In Hong Kong hospital, right? I will be a, like, in Hong Kong, Westerners are called 外母, right? Or like, 外母, what? 外母? It means white or ‘Ghost Mother’ so the
you get different treatment for that. And so, going into that environment, I will get that other treatment. Someone who speaks Cantonese will be able to converse with the staff. That happens in UK hospitals as well. I had a friend from Norway who speaks superb English, but she was treated like she was stupid because she was conversing in Norwegian with her partner. Yeah, I get that. It’s something that’s constantly on my mind. My husband’s from China but doesn’t speak Cantonese, so in Hong Kong, they speak Cantonese, but in China, they speak Mandarin. He speaks Mandarin. So he’s going to advocate as much as possible that there is that apprehension of whether there will be self-loss in translation if something happens. Is that going to be communicated clearly to me? Is there going to be self-loss in translation if something happens? Is that going to be communicated clearly to me? Yes, that’s a scary thing. Alys, thank you for being so upfront and candid about your experience and thoughts about the rest of your pregnancy journey. Lets catch up in a few weeks after your next scan. Great, let’s speak then.
BBC Radio 4: Women’s Hour 10.40am 28th December 2023 Presenter: Krupa Padhy Producer: Rebecca Myatt Studio manager: Emma Harth Analysts of birth or free birth is defined as giving birth without a health care professional in attendance anecdotally more women are making this choice in the UK but why and what sort of experiences are they having and is it safe and a responsible decision? Naomi Nygaarda is a psychotherapist and a mother who chose free birth to free birth both her children and Mavis Kirkham is a retired midwife and Emeritus Professor of Midwifery at Sheffield Hallam University and co-editor of Free Birth Stories, a collection of stories from women choosing to give birth in this way. Thank you to both of you for joining us here on Women’s Hour. Mavis, I’m going to start with you in some context. Do we know how many women are choosing this option in the UK? No, it’s impossible to count an absence from statistics and many women who choose and plan to free birth actually do not tell health care professionals and may book NHS home births and just say oh it was quick and the baby was born or we didn’t bring you up. So it is absolutely impossible to get stats on this issue. And therefore how did you come to be interested in this way of giving birth? And why did you decide to collect these stories?
So the start of my pregnancy, the first 16 weeks I was in Spain so I wasn’t able to access the usual sort of series of scans and appointments. And by the time I got back to the UK, I kind of, well, okay, what do I do now? I called my doctor, they put me in touch with maternity services. And the maternity services were extremely stressed out by the fact that I wasn’t ahead of schedule, on schedule with their protocol. And their stress really has a big impact on me. They wanted to put me in for three or four procedures at once. I found myself going from feeling like my pregnancy was going very well. I could feel that even though I felt a bit sick, I felt strong in myself. I felt that everything felt right in my body somehow. I somehow absorbed their perception that I was a bit of an accident waiting to happen and also a bit of a nuisance to them, you know, because they didn’t know me, they didn’t know all the things that their scans would have told them about me and my pregnancy. And it sort of went from bad to worse from then really. Their perception of me stuck, it had a big impact. I really wanted to work with them and was very, I guess looking back I felt, feel like I was quite naive, but I was very open to having the kind of birth that I wanted and I persisted in wanting that until very late on. In fact, basically the day that I chose to have an unassisted birth. And how was that received? I decided not to call them. Well you said that you didn’t call them, so they weren’t aware that you were going to give birth this way?
We heard more and more stories of women who were free birthing and we decided to collect these stories because we wanted a collection of them that was easily available. There are wonderful websites but they’re very specialist and we want them to be available to women because they’re inspiring stories of how wonderful undisturbed birth can be. But we also wanted them to be available to healthcare professionals because one of the motivations of Rebirth is previous feeling that women were really damaged by their previous experience of the healthcare system. And that’s important because we should make it clear that all of the women you spoke to have the NHS as a fall back option. Some of the women chose free birth for their second, third or fourth births and some for their first.
No I guess I wasn’t either until it all unfolded. I’m so so extremely lucky to have an amazing wonderful support network. So I just want to stress that having an unassisted birth was not me on my own giving birth by myself. It was me surrounded by a couple of retired midwives I know in their 70s who obviously have 40 plus years experience, have seen many, many births. I could ask them questions, they could share pictures with me, videos of women having babies. My husband was extremely supportive, my mum, I had a Doula, you know, I was just, and lots and lots of women like Mavis said, you know, women sharing stories about giving birth, what is it like, asking questions about these things. That gave me a circle of support, the circle of support that I needed to give birth without a midwife.
Did you get a sense therefore, judging by what you’ve just said there, that it was a better option for women who had already experienced childbirth with professional assistance? Individuals vary vastly. Some women spoke long journey towards free birth and over a number of pregnancies or even over a lifetime and some women like Naomi chose it for their first baby.
And maybe that circle of support, is it crucial if women choose to give birth this way? I imagine not everyone has access to a community of retired midwives or even supportive family members.
Let’s bring Naomi in. So with your first pregnancy you had planned to give birth with the assistance of NHS maternity services but then what happened?
Women who really choose free birth because what they want is privacy and they really want possibly their partner there maybe not even their partner but most of the women in the book wanted people they trusted to support them and they went out and they found these people and there are good networks there are
online networks there are Doulas and there are midwives who are willing to be incredibly supportive although they running a lot of risk if they’re employed yeah and maybe so I should make it clear that while she’s written this book, co-edited the book, and you describe yourself as not pro-rebirth, just explain your position on this. Yes, I support women’s choice to give birth where they feel safe and with people who they feel trust them, who they trust and who are supportive. It is tragic to me that for these 50-odd women those were not health care professionals as a career-long midwife but I feel it is women’s right to give birth where they feel safe and these women did not feel safe in NHS care. Naomi does that resonate? Did you not feel safe in NHS care? 100% 100% and I resonate with Maeve, safety was 100% my main focus and the reason that I didn’t call a midwife. I was really optimistic, interested in the idea of continuity of care, so getting to know a midwife or a small group of midwives that would be the one that was present at my birth, getting to know them, talk with them and feel the kind of person that they were, feel that they trusted my capacity to be able to give birth and actually that just wasn’t on offer. I was told that it was very unlikely that I’d know the person that came and I couldn’t really take that risk. I didn’t know what they would be like inviting them to my home because I was planning a home birth. And in the end I opted to have one of those retired midwives present at the birth along with my mum, my dealer, my husband, that was for the first birth. And then with my daughter, with my second child, it was so clear to me that I didn’t want to invite that negativity that I’d experienced in antenatally with my son, that I decided not to tell the NHS about my pregnancy and actually just my sister and my husband were present in that birth. Were you ever fearful throughout any of this? Were you ever fearful about things going wrong because it’s important to stress that you know giving birth is huge it can be dangerous and it you know there are risks for both mother and child. That is very fortunate that I had these two retired midwives in their 70s I could ask questions of I knew that they had seen all manner of things and and if there was something I needed to worry about they would tell me and I kind of got I realised that there were three sort of big risks, that I needed to understand and know about and I became well-versed in what I would do if those things came up for me but really the message I got strongly was as a healthy woman who just had a healthy pregnancy this was also my second child it was extremely unlikely that something for example like a post-partum haemorrhage would happen to me and I knew I would do if I if I did come across that.
Maybe it’s on that, so you include a chapter of stories about when things go wrong with rebirths. Just explain what you learnt and just how prepared women are for the fact that sometimes things do go wrong. Well first of all I want to say this is a very UK book in the sense that all these women apart from one who opted to give birth overseas all these women had the NHS as a safety net and on some occasions they called upon it. This makes the book very specific to this country. But they they chose to give birth where they felt safe and one thing I learned from this book is that the women were incredibly perceptive when no one was interfering with their focus on their bodies and their birth and their babies they were incredibly aware of what was happening I mean there was one woman for instance who had the classic obstetric emergency of a prolapsed umbilical cord and she did all the right things she adopted a knee chest position she called 999 she was taken to hospital. She had an immediate caesarean and she talked about her body trying to suck the baby back in this terrible emergency and I’ve never heard that said before because although I’ve seen this emergency before I’ve never seen it in a woman who was so tuned in to her own body. Of course not everybody will have that instinct and I wonder if there are some women. They were very very well prepared these were in red they researched some had got professional qualifications before they even got pregnant this spurof-the-moment decision. Are there some women in your opinion Mavis who should not consider this option? I think we have to trust women’s judgment a lot of women would not dream of this option and would feel safe in hospital and would entertain this idea. And that’s fine. What I’m advocating is their choice. I want to read this response from the Royal College of Midwives. We did ask them to comment on the fact that more women are choosing pre-births because they’ve had a negative or traumatic personal experience of maternity services and feel that they have more autonomy at home. They said, whilst we recognise and respect every woman’s right to develop a birth plan that’s right for them, having a qualified midwife or other skilled medical professional present throughout childbirth significantly reduces the risk to both woman and child. If a woman has any concerns about their pregnancy or wishes to change their plan we recommend that you contact your midwife or maternity team. And I also want to bring you a statement from the Department for Health and Social Care who said that they published new guidance for providing mental and physical health checks six weeks post delivery ensuring women who decide not to give birth in the presence of a health care provider can more easily access medical care and advice
So again stressing more guidance for clinicians to ensure that women who choose to have birth this way are more prepared and participating. I wonder maybe, do you think this is a sign that things are changing? That the NHS is more accepting of women wanting to give birth these ways? I think they’re accepting that this is how things are but the problem is that we’re working on the wrong model there’s no good having the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff. We need to create a system where people feel safe with healthcare professionals the problem is we’ve got an industrial model where women feel they’re on a conveyor belt that services are standardised and people don’t come in standard packages. If we respect the autonomy of women and we give them continuity of care which we know greatly improves clinical outcomes then not a lot of free birthing would be felt by the women to be necessary. We have the means of overcoming a lot of the problems but we’re not doing it. This is partly because the service is grossly underfunded and under staffed but it’s also because it is on the wrong model. Birth is not a mechanical thing it’s about relationships. Where people know and trust their midwives the situation is very different. Mavis Kirkham and Naomi Nygaarda thank you both for your insights on this story. To the many of you who have sent in comments on this as a retired midwife this one on free birthing as a retired midwife of 40 years I’ve seen situations where free birthing has been an instrument of coercive control by the partner it’s always important to be alert to this happening thank you to the many of you who have sent in comments on this story and the others and do join me again for tomorrow’s Women’s Hour. Thanks for listening there’s plenty more again for tomorrow’s Women’s Hour. Thanks for listening there’s plenty more from Women’s Hour over at BBC.
After Effects -session with Nathan Ward, and annoyingly, the audio I recorded it on got corrupt. The way he was trying to teach me was difficult, as he didn’t let me use the screen to practice and experience what he was showing me. From this session, the drawn frame must be expanded upwards to the top left and right. In making the imagery have a life to it if you draw the background five times and put them on a boil- the image feels alive. This technique can be achieved using different surfaces, densities and textures. The pacing needs to be set for 24 frames per second. The quality set to a quarter at 300 dots per inch. This means the film quality is good even if shown at a large cinematic scale. Time follows from left to right.
Moving Image or static image? Note from Tutorial 15/01/24. The boils and movement make the animation feel more like it’s not just flat or still. What you’re doing is you’re putting energy into time because traditionally you’ve drawn what’s in front of you, in a documentary sense of images, and that is then the communication, but have you got a strategy for why a moving image is going to be more helpful? GG No, I don’t. I’m trying to determine whether it works better as a sequence of not moving or moving. JW It’s worth documenting in your research because there’s a big difference between static and moving images. GG
Listening with Angie, who gave birth to baby Milo in July 2023. These questions we sent via text. 1. In retrospect- do you think you had the information you needed to prepare for Milos birth? Yes I did. We paid for an antenatal class which was very detailed. Read a hypnobirthing book was also very informative. I wish I had done more research on pushing, as in the moment it didn’t come naturally. Hypno-birthing had me thinking my body would push but that didn’t happen. I was coached to hold my breath and push (purple pushing) which went against what I had learnt. 2. How were the first few weeks? I lost 1.5 litres of blood after my birth so I felt very faint and out of it for weeks after. I felt prepared for the birth but the 2 night stay in hospital (which is short compared to some) really tested my mental health, I couldn’t settle Milo in the nights and was worried about keeping others awake. Breastfeeding was a struggle at first. Midwives were helping us to latch but it wasn’t working and Milo was constantly hungry. We were assessed for tongue tie and referred to be seen. I pushed to be discharged because I didn’t sleep for 4 nights. But when we got home I couldn’t get Milo to latch. My sister who has 3 kids who all had tongue tie said Milo had a severe one. With her experience and my mum being a health visitor before retiring, they encouraged me to push for an TT apt asap. Without their experience of NHS I wouldn’t have acted and waited for apt in 2 weeks. Milk came in the next day and hormones were high, I cried on the phone to the hospital and got a apt for Milo to be assessed the next day. He had a grade A TT and got it snipped. After this feeding improved loads.
I think if we had waited for the original apt we would had to use formula and was appointment likely to give up on breastfeeding. Things started to improve on about day 8 when my instincts kicked in and held Milo close or in a sling. I had wished I researched more about feeding but really there is no way to prepare as it’s a collaboration with the baby. 3. Did you feel supported by your healthcare providers after birth - in those first few weeks My midwives at the birth were incredible. I had visits from different health visitors for the first few days. The first was inexperienced and panicked me about Milos weight loss. But then the 2nd that came was covering and was amazing, she was really reassuring about Milos weight gain, and referred me to be seen as my stitches were infected. The feeding team were amazing and acting quickly to resolve Milos tongue tie. I was surprised to learn only 3 people in the hospital were trained to assess and snip a tongue tie. 4. What would you tell your pre Mum self now you have experienced your first birth story? I would say don’t worry about moisturising your belly as you won’t give a toss about stretch marks, you’ll come to love them. Your concern will be your organs staying in place (prolapse). Wish I learnt how to do pelvic floor exercises properly. Wish I stocked my freezer with more food.
Angie’s answers to these four essential questions demonstrate how, as women, community, sisterly, and motherly support are critical in supporting ourselves at such a vulnerable time and not to be afraid of challenging health professionals when our instincts tell us something doesn’t feel right. In any other setting, any of the four issues Angie has encountered would cause much more to shout about. One- she’s had a haemorrhage. Two- she’s got a prolapse. Three- she’s got infected stitches. Four- the baby’s got a grade-A tongue tie. Therefore she could not breastfeed initially - through perseverance and asking questions about his tongue tie, she was able to. Yet she voices and communicates her birth story as and in a positively framed experience.
Reader 4 Feedback from Dr John Miers “I am assuming that as this is still an early stage of the PhD narrative, the breadth of looking at a subject through the title question comes before the depths of what those findings are and how they can be developed into a design process that will be useful to my intended audiences” Yes absolutely! I think everything up to upgrade can be considered an early stage, but we will want to move towards getting some of those deeper investigations going as they are develops. Discussing which aspects of your research you might want to dig into further would be a good topic for our next meeting. Do you think that telling some of the stories, or excerpts of the stories, related in the first column might be an element of the work you produce for the PhD? As primary research, these interviews already do a good job of underscoring the complex and individual nature of every birth. The comments about dismissing the traumas that can be caused by aspects of birthing and the lack of acknowledgement of the time needed to recover also made me think of the pressure women can often feel to return to work quickly, and the more general, inherently ableist, expectation of constant productivity everyone is subject to. “I find that sometimes it can feel that you are continuing to “empty” yourself advice and information to students” – as it’s the end of term I identify very strongly with that statement! The Birth Rights Collection conference sounds great! And graphic medicine, I’ll be submitting something to that too. The website is now live, proposals due January 26th Interviews / text reports I really like the way you frame the stories you’ve been telling us through interviews and text reports, things like calling it “listening with Justine Howlett” rather than “interview with Justine Howlett”, and the comment “three new babies have been safely delivered in this reader” on the first page. The fact that your excitement at seeing these new lives being created, and the supportive nature of the relationship you have with their mothers, is strongly evident in the conversations, feels important. I don’t mean just as a “nice, touchyfeely” flavour to the research, but actually as an important part of your methodology. Approaching your topic from a starting point of empathy and care improves the quality of the research. It’s obvious from all of the documentation in the readers that it means you get better, richer responses from your primary research subjects. But it’s also important to how you think about the project, making sure that the mother’s experience is centred. You do all of this stuff naturally, of course but when you get
to writing more formal accounts of your methodology I think it needs to be emphasised as not just morally and emotionally but also intellectually important. Justine mentioned access and who is able to advocate for themselves. For me it was interesting that you introduced her desire to be well-informed during her pregnancy in direct connection to her level of education – already indicating a link between the social capital possessed by graduates and their ability to self-advocate. The bit in the conversation where you explained to Justine what you’re doing with the animation was great – more of that please! Practice That would probably be my main overall comment. It feels a bit odd to be giving you advice that we probably both give to our students all the time, but I think the role of practice could be interrogated a bit more here. You explained to Justine that with the animation drawings you were searching for a visual language that balanced accuracy and softness. That might feel very obvious to you, but I found it useful to read in terms of understanding what you were getting out of producing that work. I think it would be worthwhile doing more written reflection on your practical experiments and documentation. This can comment not just on visual language but on choices of subject matter. There’s a strong focus on the details of biological processes (in general, I think, but maybe particularly so in this reader). It would be interesting to read some comments on what understandings you get from visually recording and interpreting this sort of subject matter, as opposed to, say, making drawings of environments or events that are actually a direct part of the birthing experience (like your earlier drawings of rooms and equipment at Kingston maternity unit). What different “ways in” to the project do these different drawing exercises give you? (I’m not saying you haven’t included commentary on the practical work, there is a fair bit in here, but it can tend towards the descriptive – giving context to the Hunterian collection, for example, or explaining what stages of pregnancy are captured in different drawings) Reading/secondary material There isn’t really much point in reproducing newspaper articles (PP.23–24), better to just include references and give a summary of what you found interesting/useful about them, with a few quotes to back up your commentary – like what you’ve done with the books. Some substantial texts on PP.29–30. Kitzinger seems to have struck a chord, and I’m sorry to hear that it took you a long time to get through The Story of Pain, but also pleased to hear that you’ve got a lot out of it!
I like the fact that Michael Stafford’s book had been recommended to you by a previous interviewee, and that most of your commentary on this book consists of visual analysis. Those two features give a sense of continuity and development, and we start to get a feeling of different aspects of research working together. As part of developing the literature review it will also be a good idea to try to get an overview of illustrated, or at least visually-led, material that is offered to expectant mothers to support the birthing process. I don’t mean stuff like that Dr Spock book, but trying to find examples of things like bespoke plan is produced by the Positive Birth Company (mentioned in the first Times article) – what do these plans look like? How are they presented? What sort of material and information do they cover? That might take a bit more digging, as it’s less easily available, but would be informative, I think. Meeting with Kate Nothing to add here – she knows the stuff much better than I do! In fact I learned something about the details of how ethics applications are processed at Kingston by reading it!
Tutorial notes and feedback from meeting with Geoff Grandfield and Dr John Miers. 15/01/24.
Maturity means that you’ve got a handle on life. It means that you understand, and it keeps returning to that same question, which is a great question: what do you wish you knew now? So that’s such a fundamental thing, that thing about where does confidence come from? So this whole thing about the growth and support of realistic self-confidence is one of the critical things you’re examining here. And you should articulate that in your IMR. GG/JM
Lots of us have experienced a medical professional draw a diagram for us. I’ve mentioned that when the doctor draws something or the consultant goes, “I don’t want you to Google this.” JW You just said a brilliant line, “like when the doctor draws it.” That would be a fascinating thing to explore—the action of doctors drawing diagrams. GG Because I had one when I was waiting to have my hysterectomy, and it’s, I think, for lots of women, everything that is described to you that’s wrong with your reproductive organs is always associated with some fruit bowl. JW
I’ve been looking at is how my teaching has fed into this and vice versa, so looking at the Re-present project, so the illustrated reader through that, and then looking at, taking examples of student work, of how, like the testing of that, and this was interesting, I did a workshop, revolved around the content of a research project, so this was a test of the methodologies I am using in my PhD and how these can apply to establishing a student’s extended research project. Looking at why we have different interests, what is it content-wise? This was a workshop with Level 6. So stories, what books, what films do you like, what stories do you enjoy? Do you like writing your own fiction, poetry, or historical figure that you want to know more about? Issues: what do you care about? What’s under explored or not known about? to explain or teach, how and who for? JW
Why are female reproduction parts compared to a fruit bowl? Is it that women are supposed to be familiar with the contents of domestic shopping bag? A fruit bowl - out on the table and up for grabs?—the relationship between fruit and the human scale. It is used as a comparable form throughout your pregnancy and beyond. For example- today, your baby is the size of an apple pip, a grape, an avocado the length of a banana, then a cucumber. Finally, we move into the territory of a pineapple and a majestic watermelon. JW
So if you look at things like Green for Danger, the film where they mix up the oxygen, nitrogen, and so on, it’s colour-coded. Think how people also use symbols so that they would put a circle on something. So, shape the signage of ‘being able to help people navigate the medical journey.’ It’s a great phrase, ‘mapping the journey.’ It’s like you’re going on a road trip, could it be through a series of medical procedures, where they can be different types of junctions, traffic lights, and decision-making? GG
I think it’s a suite of packages that your health, this is my ideal thing, that your health care provider could go, before you have this procedure, look at this, just watch this. One of the things I spoke about before is the gestational diabetes test, where women go to it, and don’t realise that having a glass of orange juice and a bowl of Cocoa Pops is a good breakfast. Then blood sugars look high, so it costs to get them back in for a blood test for gestational diabetes. Then they might not have read the leaflet that if you eat gum, it procedure doesn’t work because your stomach started doing the digestive process so that there’s lots of money wasted on parts of that in the NHS that if the communication was slightly better yeah or was more accessible. JW
I’m trying to determine whether it works better as a sequence of not moving or moving. JW It’s worth documenting in your research because there’s a big difference between static and moving images. GG
Graphic Medicine Conference 2024. Matrescence, Magic and Misapprehensions: Birth Stories. This practice-based investigation aims to illuminate women’s perceptions of a ‘normal’ birth experience. This seven-minute lightning talk will explore two key graphic narratives created around and in response to the experience of childbirth and outline Jane Webster’s practice-based PhD question -Birth Stories: ‘How can choice and confidence be encouraged in the experience of birthing Mothers through illustration animation practice?’ News of a pregnancy can be magical and longed for; it also can be a time of enormous change and uncertainty to all stakeholders in the development and birth of a baby or babies. Kate Evan’s graphic narrative is titled, ‘Bump- How to Make, Grow and Birth a Baby, 2014, and takes the reader through the journey of making a baby and understanding your body and physiology. Growing a baby - the process of a ‘normal’ pregnancy are presented in this book. Concluding with the baby’s birth. Only, not in the array, and often unspoken processes that birth takes place. Lucy Knisley’s graphic novel ‘Kid Gloves- Nine Months Of Careful Chaos,2019, presents the scenario of childbirth from the journey of the teenager and contraception in avoiding pregnancy at all costs. The baby that does not materialise when the time is ‘right,’ the narrative of a difficult pregnancy and the trauma of the postpartum experience. The talk will investigate the language and content in the visual and written analysis of the pregnancy stories both authors communicate and how the PhD research of ‘Birth Stories’ explores the language and presentation of individuals’ experience of pregnancy and birth ‘is a story’ and can often be dictated to the person experiencing their narrative in idealised and unrealistic forms. The research investigates why accurate birth information is guarded and why the choices of how one’s expected birth story will take a different route and not the desired reality, leaving women disillusioned at a time of significant vulnerability. Above is the abstract submitted to the ‘Graphic Medicine’ conference held in Athlone, Ireland, 16th -18th July 2024, at the University of Shannon. This year’s conference’s theme is ‘Magic’ presentations focusing on health, illness, caregiving, and disability as they intersect with comics in any form (e.g., graphic novels and memoirs, comic strips, mini-comics, webcomics, etc.). The conference will feature in-person presentations, workshops, and a variety of innovative digital outputs considering the following.
*What magic are you experiencing and sharing via comics as they relate to health, well-being, care giving, illness, and disability? *How might the addition/application of Graphic Medicine bring magic to work in your field? *How is Graphic Medicine sparking magic across disciplines? What possible creative horizons do you envision for the future of Graphic Medicine? *How can Graphic Medicine bridge the real and the imagined? This presentation has been proposed as a seven minute ‘Lightening Talk.” As an illustrator and image maker who does not associate my practice with comic making, after talking with John about how I can align my practice and PhD research with the theme of comics and the content of exploring birth stories? We discussed how my reading list could anchor my abstract from my first two readers, where Bump by Kate Evans and Nine Months of Careful Chaos by Lucy Kingsley present two very different experiences of birth stories. Evans’ graphic narrative focuses on the ‘normal’ processes of preparing, building, and birthing a baby. Kingsley’s experience explores how, as teenage women, we avoid pregnancy at all costs, the baby not materialising at the ‘right’ time, the longed-for absent baby, the treacherous pregnancy and the birth narrative that goes off-piste and the recovery after having post-surgery complexities and trauma as a new mother, and feelings of ‘having to get on with it.’ I hear in late February if I have had the abstract accepted. Even if unsuccessful, this exercise has helped me consider how to align research into a form that could be clearer, but thinking around the questions through the reading and research that you may have glossed over. In the process of being inside such a lengthy and, on the whole, self-sustained project, the edges or parameters can feel either too far away or confining. This thought sounds oxymoronic, but my feelings towards the project can flip from feeling,’ This is great! - I can achieve something important to those experiencing the pregnancy and birth journey- pat me on the back.’ To believe the opposite of ‘what can I achieve that isn’t there already - possibly created with AI and looks slick and moves like a stealth morphing dream.’ I am interested in hearing other PhD researcher’s thoughts on self-doubt and imposter syndrome.