Michelle (she/her) is a certified full spectrum doula and community organizer. Her dissertation offers an ethnographic account of how Black midwives, doulas, and birthing people in the Bay Area mobilize embodied, de-medicalized approaches to care that she conceptualizes as “centering.” It examines how these practices respond to the limitations of state-provided reproductive health systems, particularly for Black birthing people.

Through fieldwork with Black birthworkers and families, the project traces centering as both a practical and political mode of care grounded in embodied knowledge, ancestral traditions, and community-based support systems. These practices foster more autonomous, affirming, and life-sustaining birth experiences while challenging biomedical authority and state regulation of reproduction.

Ultimately, the dissertation argues that Black birthworkers are not only offering alternative models of care, but are also actively reimagining reproductive politics through frameworks of community care, collective liberation, and reproductive justice rooted in Black feminist praxis.