The goal of this research is to analyze the arising of the doula profession in Italy.
Doulas are professional who offer emotional, informational and practical support to women and their families, during pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum.
The profile is born in U.S.A in the seventies and in Italy it began to develop at the end of nineties. The first Doula Training started in 2007. Nowadays doulas trained are six hundred and about half of them practice as professionals. Doula profession is ruled by law num.4/2013 “Disposizioni in materia di professioni non organizzate”.
To understand how doulas are defining their space in the system of profession, the research will investigate doulas profession through the study of their practices, their representations and the processes developed to obtain cultural and social jurisdiction.
In typical Chicago tradition and following in particular the work of Andrew Abbott (1988), the research will adopt the concept of profession. The history of a profession is influenced by the broader history of the system of professions. Doulas are involved in acquiring control of an area of work which is related to other professions in maternity care. Midwives constitute the professional group which is most involved in this process and, through their representative body, they are developing strong opposition to the arising of doula profession.
The work is based on interviews and ethnography. The research shows the results of the analysis of 32 biographical interviews conducted with doulas, 14 with midwives and 4 privileged actors. Interviews share the same methodological basis, which match the ethno sociological approach (Bertaux 1999) with the dialogic approach (La Mendola 2009). The ethnographic work took place during trainings and meetings for doulas, where the researcher participated as a doula. Ethnographic notes (Gobo 2001, Corsaro 1985) are interwoven with autoethnografic ones (Ellis 1995, Ellis et al. 2011).
Through the study of doula profession the work tries to understand the birth of a new profession in an ecological view, analyzing internal and external competition to the definition of cultural and social jurisdiction. Moreover this work aims at contributing to the study of transformative processes that affected professions in Italy
