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Short abstract:

Science and Technology Studies have problematised scholarly engagement for long. This paper explores what scholarly practice could learn from preventive care professionals in the NL fostering 'everyday courage as a collective practice' by re-telling struggles experienced in their everyday practice.

Long abstract:

Science and Technology Studies have problematised scholarly engagement for long. Feminist inspired STS scholarship insisted thereby on not forgetting about ‘matters of care’ (Puig de la Bellacasa 2015). Drawing on such scholarship, this paper argues that attention to the mundane as it happens in a ‘here-and-now’, deserves utmost attention. This allows us to explore, what Ferreira da Silva (2015) refers to as, an ‘excess of possibilities’ always already there, of how to live in difference together. Drawing on ethnographic research on a public preventive care approach in the Netherlands 'Not Pregnant Now' shows that professionals seems to establish and keep in ‘personal contact/touch’ and resist the ‘distancing’ and ‘abstracting from everyday life’ that biomedicalization/scientification and professionalisation of public health care and social work seem to require. How do they hold on to the complexities, struggles of everyday life and thereby transform ‘being vulnerable’ into an actual strength? How do they keep on doing so, even while scaling up as a programme and being included in broader preventive public health strategies on a national level by the Ministry of Health through the very success(rate) the approach has and can scientifically validate? This paper argues that it requires ‘everyday courage as a collective practice’ to do so. Listening, telling and re-telling the struggles encountered in the everyday seems to be a method to foster, share and cultivate such everyday courage collectively. This paper aims to explore what scholarly practice could learn from those preventive care professionals that ‘stay true’ to such struggles.