Rikka Homanen, an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at Gender Studies and the Research Center for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies, School of Social Sciences and Humanities at the University of Tampere, Finland, discusses the evaluation of motherhood in the assessment practices of maternity healthcare provided by the Finish welfare state. It argues that while middle-class women can position themselves more easily than workingclass women as neoliberal, reflexive and self-responsible client-consumers, and can have their family values reflected back to them by maternity nurses, there is also room for values and subjects of value beyond the dominant symbolic of parenthood.
Sponsored by the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, and the Dean of Undergraduate Studies.