Hope Erin Bastian

HOPE BASTIAN, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, was awarded a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellowship in September 2023 to aid research and writing on “Becoming a Mother: Networked Matrescence in Late-Socialist Cuba”. Globally, networked technologies have significantly impacted everyday practices and processes of identity formation, creating new opportunities for social movements. Since 2018, young Cubans have used mobile internet and digital platforms to create mutual-aid networks to care for themselves, their families, and vulnerable neighbors endangered by collapsing state infrastructures. Bastian’s ethnography of contemporary post-Soviet Cuban experiences of pregnancy, birth, and postpartum care introduces Networked Matrescence, a new analytic to describe the networks and relationships through which women doula each other into new social roles and identities as mothers. Contemporary Cuban maternity is shaped by two sets of technologies: biomedical technologies, controlled by bureaucratized state health infrastructures and mobile technologies, through which women create alternative person-centered communities of care based that challenge the authoritative knowledge of Cuba’s health system and unequal relationships between patients, healthcare providers, and the state. Combining digital ethnography in emerging online communities and traditional fieldwork in clinics, Bastian shows how Cuban mothers’ health activism and identity work is key to understanding the re-privatization of social reproduction in Late-Socialist Cuba.