The Department of Religious Studies is delighted to announce that Sarah Harvey has completed her PhD in theology and Religious Studies under the supervision of Professor Gordon Lynch.
Sarah’s thesis, entitled ‘The Birth I Want’: Negotiating the Ideal and Practical in Natural Birth, explores the disjunction between a public, moralised discourse of natural birth and women’s own more complex narratives of practical decision making and lived experience.
Sarah focuses on women’s negotiations of these two dimensions, which she terms ‘the work of birth’, which includes the planning, preparation and practice in which some women are involved during their pregnancies, and argues that this work can be considered an ethical self-formation in which women work on the self in order to construct and present a particular subjectivity – of the good and responsible mother.
Congratulations to Sarah on this achievement.
Interested in postgraduate study at the University of Kent? Find out more about the PhD in Theology and Religious Studies.