Crafting care: the case of the Kangaroo Mother Care Method

Abstract

The Kangaroo Mother Care method (KMC) is a cost-effective technology developed during the 1970s in Bogotá, Colombia, to care for premature and low birth weight infants without the use of expensive and high-technology medical equipment such as incubators. This paper examines the making of the KMC in resource-constrained neonatal care settings and explores how adversity challenges background assumptions in prevailing protocols and technologies of neonatal care, creating opportunities for reassembling actors and methodologies, and thus enacting new realities in healthcare. Using ethnographic data and interviews with healthcare professionals and drawing from current official guidelines, we analyze the socio-material reconfigurations promoted by the KMC’s development and its broader implications for neonatal care. We contend that KMC’s emergence demonstrates the potential for marginalized and precarious standpoints to challenge dominant healthcare models, opening pathways to more inclusive and situated technologies and practices, and, in the process, to new (and better) worlds.