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Доульское сопровождение родов: генезис, дискурсы и практики эмоциональной и физической немедицинской заботы
The article regards the prac tice of paid emotional, informational and physical assistance to women during pregnancy, childbirth and the postpartum period, as well as the Russianspeaking providers of these services: perinatal experts independent of obstetric institu tions, selfpresenting themselves mainly as «professional», «partum», or «postpar tum» doulas. Using a neoWeberian ap proach to (para)medical knowledge, jobs, and professions, the author illustrates influence of the state and market on the spread of nonmedical emotional and physical care practices in the modern Russian maternity hospital.
Despite the informal status of nonmed ical assistants and the associated risks, the educational and digital activism of the doula network leads to the con struction of special competence, stand ards, ethics, and language, but also to an increase in the number of «certified» doulas. Labor and educational mobility, family and digital everyday life of care agents with no official status involved in precarious and paid maternal selfem ployment also contribute to autonomous selfregulation of the community, recep tion and standardization of approaches, reassembling the boundaries of activity, local volunteering and popularization/ broadcasting of doula discourse.
The phenomena described in the article con tribute to an accelerated change in the entire medical landscape, biomedical knowledge and discourse towards fur ther humanization (mainly commercial) of modern obstetrics. In particular, the author records the emergence of pa tientcentered communication, informed coordination of medical interventions, partial demedicalization, taking into account evidencebased medicine data in new protocols and routine practices, expanding the agency of women in la bor when choosing participants, place, and method of delivery.
The research is based on a communicative analysis of discourses and narratives that have been collected since 2017 in the field ethnographic study of perinatal practic es and their representations in various contexts and sources. The database includes semistructured indepth inter views, information from social networks and media resources, and regulations.