BACKGROUND:
Worldwide, midwives operate within tension-filled environments, caught between the imperatives of biomedical safety and a desire for a more humanistic, emancipatory, and culturally situated approach to childbirth. Within these contexts of competing norms, emotions become vehicles of meaning, critique, and professional repositioning.

OBJECTIVES:
This presentation explores how the emotional experiences of midwives working under constraint can lead them to circumvent or reinterpret institutional norms in order to safeguard the humanity of care.

METHODS:
This research adopts a qualitative, inductive, and multi-sited methodology. It combines a reflexive autoethnographic stance — grounded in thirty years of practice across twelve countries — with 57 interviews conducted with midwives from 36 countries across the Global North and South, spanning five continents. Conducted between October 2023 and April 2024 via videoconference (in English, French, Portuguese, or Spanish), these interviews, averaging 65 minutes in length, were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed transversally. The analysis draws on the sociology of emotions (Hochschild, Jaggar), theories of quiet resistance (Scott, Foucault), and the concepts of epistemic injustice (Fricker, De Sousa Santos).

RESULTS:
Two interrelated concepts emerged from the interviews: • Rebellious emotions: anger, shame, sadness, or indignation in response to practices perceived as unjust or dehumanizing. These emotions function as ethical compasses, prompting repositioning or transgression. • Low-profile resistances: subtle adjustments and silent gestures that circumvent norms, aiming to preserve women's autonomy and the dignity of care, without direct confrontation. These forms of resistance embody a situated professional ethics grounded in emotional, experiential, and socio-cultural knowledge.

CONCLUSIONS:
The narratives collected reveal critical tensions, subtle repositionings, and the mobilization of often-invisible forms of knowledge — emotional, experiential, and local.

KEY MESSAGE:
Through their silent resistances, midwives are reshaping the contours of a plural, critical, and emancipatory midwifery, offering concrete pathways to reconcile biomedical knowledge with emotional, experiential, and endogenous forms of women’s knowledge. Education - cultural safety