Communities of practice and pregnant women: Is there a connection?

Abstract

This article considers the usefulness of the community of practice framework (Eckert & McConnell-Ginet 1992) to an analysis of women's pregnancy stories. The study reveals that the operative communities of practice in the lives of pregnant women are the communities comprised of doctors, health professionals, family members etc., all of whom have specific and well-defined opinions about pregnancy. Although pregnant women do not themselves constitute a community of practice, the framework leads to a variety of insights about women and pregnancy. From analyzing women's stories, it becomes apparent that others routinely construct for women what their pregnancy is to consist of – often trying to make of it a monolithic experience, whether or not this coincides with a woman's own experience. Women's stories provide data that explicitly address the intersection and collision of disparate communities of practice.I would like to thank Janet Holmes for suggesting that I apply the community of practice framework to my corpus of pregnancy stories. Thinking about this has led me to insights that I might not have otherwise had. I would also like to thank my colleague and friend, Alice Greenwood, for the very careful reading that she did of several earlier drafts of this paper. Her comments contributed significantly to the development of the ideas for this article. Of course I alone am responsible for what is presented below.