Simona Spiegel

This research examines how midwifery knowledge is learned, practiced, and negotiated in contemporary training environments in California. Supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the study draws on ethnographic fieldwork conducted primarily in the San Francisco Bay Area and Los Angeles. Engaging methods of participant-observation, apprenticeship-based learning, interviews, and sustained engagement in midwifery education and community spaces, the researcher explores scholar-practitioner perspectives on intuition and affective knowledges. The study focuses on the everyday work of becoming a midwife, tracing how skills, judgment, and forms of experiential knowledge take shape through hands-on practice, mentorship, and collective learning over time and across contexts. Findings highlight how learning unfolds across formal and informal settings, as trainees navigate professional expectations, institutional requirements, and pathways into care work within a regulated healthcare landscape. The research also attends to how access, belonging, and participation are shaped by broader social and institutional conditions such as racialization and racism. By foregrounding intuition as a relational and embodied learning process, this research contributes to anthropological conversations about expertise, belonging, and care, while offering insight into contemporary midwifery education in California.