Here you can find an overview of all ReproSoc's Annual Lectures. Please subscribe to the ReproSoc Youtube channel to keep up to date with our future videos.
The 9th Annual Public ReproSoc Lecture 2022
REPRODUCTIVE CAUSE AND EFFECT: A SOCIOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE
Sarah Franklin
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The 8th Annual Public ReproSoc Lecture 2022
Regulating Reproduction Revisited
Emily Jackson
In this lecture, Prof Emily Jackson revisited some of the themes of her 2001 book Regulating Reproduction: Law, Technology and Autonomy, in which she argued that women’s reproductive autonomy should be better protected by the law. Have things improved over the last 21 years, or has there been one step forwards and two steps backwards?
The Seventh Annual ReproSoc Lecture 2021
The Limits of Choice: Non-Heteronormative Reproductive Tactics in Poland
Joanna Mizielińska
While in the West, there is an increasing tendency to discuss reproductive normativity among non-heterosexual people, which is related to the legal recognition and protection of their parentage as well as the availability of choices, in Poland their possibilities of becoming parents are very limited. Pronatalist state policies regulating access to assisted reproductive techniques are selective, heteronormative and exclusive. It is enough to mention that the so-called 2015 ‘In Vitro’ Act establishes the possibility of using the services of infertility treatment clinics in Poland only for heterosexual couples who are married or cohabit. Therefore, the law restricts same-sex couples who want to raise a child in their ways of implementing reproductive plans. When they are raising a child, they struggle with non-recognition of the nature of their own family, especially the bonds between the child and the co-parent remains completely unprotected. During the lecture, I aim to show how non-heterosexual people in Poland, despite these restrictions, become parents. What reproductive tactics do they choose? What legal loopholes are they exploiting? What factors influence their choice (gender, material status, class affiliation, age)? I will refer to the results of the research project "Families of Choice in Poland", which I directed.
The Sixth Annual ReproSoc Lecture 2020
The Afterlife of Eugenics: Incarcerated Women and the Fertility Continuum
France Winddance Twine
In 1909 California became the third state to pass eugenics laws that sanctioned involuntary sterilization of institutionalized individuals deemed ‘unfit to reproduce’. These laws remained on the books until their repeal in 1979. In the summer of 2013, the Center for Investigative Reporting published an article alleging that female inmates in California state prisons had been sterilized without their consent and without procedural accountability. This exposé prompted a state investigation which confirmed that 144 women had been sterilized in California state prisons between 2005 and 2006 and 2012- 2013. This talk explores how mass incarceration, structural racism, gender inequality and neo-liberalism combine to constrain the reproductive agency of incarcerated women and violate their bodily integrity. By situating recent investigations of unnecessary hysterectomies in US prisons within the larger history of eugenics in the United States, this lecture brings Twine’s concept of the ‘fertility continuum’ into dialogue with Dorothy Roberts concept of ‘reproductive liberty’. The outsourcing of prison management to private corporations has produced a profit-driven and under-regulated carceral structure that is responsible for the delivery of reproductive health care and management of fertility for increasing numbers of women – with especially devastating consequences for impoverished, Black, Native American and Spanish-speaking citizens and immigrants from the Caribbean and Latin America. In turn these violations significantly widen the analysis of what Dana Ain Davis calls ‘Reproductive (In)Justice’.
The Fifth Annual ReproSoc Lecture 2019
Whose Biological Clock? Temporal Inevitability and Assisted Reproduction in Contemporary India
Anindita Majumdar
The relation between time and ageing defines the increasingly influential concept of the biological clock. This conceptualization is especially potent in relation to the reproductive body, and its expected, inevitable decline. Imagined as a ‘curse’, the ticking clock operates both as a metaphor and a tour de force in assisted reproduction in India. In this endeavor, I am interested in seeking out the meanings of age and ageing as they come to be understood within reproduction in India. The focus is particularly on assisted conception, and the use of assisted reproductive technologies (ART) such as in-vitro fertilization to engage with the issue of reproductive temporality. What forms of socio-medical imaginings influence this form of temporality? Can time and age be seen beyond the life cycle to understand how particular technologies are used to ‘reconfigure’ it?
The Fourth Annual ReproSoc Lecture 2018
On Separation: Reproduction in Migra-Political Times
Charis Thompson
In this talk, Charis Thompson presented her recent work advocating the addition of a migrapolitical lens to biopolitical and necropolitical ways of understanding the differential valuing of contemporary human life. With reference to her own concept of selective pronatalism, and in conversation with other bio- and necropolitical work on stratified reproduction, reproductive justice, selecting societies, and queer reproductions, Thompson argued for the importance of considering migration as foundational, with birth and death, to a new sociology of reproduction. To illustrate, she did a close reading of the concept of ‘separation’ as a kinship and family term, and argued that its current political salience in regard to migration can help us understand and potentially influence the role that migrapolitics play more generally in kinship and reproduction.
The Third Annual ReproSoc Public Lecture 2017
Security as Reproduction: the Biopolitics of Walls in Israel/Palestine and Beyond
Rosalind Petchesky
It was with great enthusiasm and excitement that ReproSoc welcomed Rosalind Petchesky to Cambridge this autumn to deliver a lecture on a new definition of reproductive politics as securitization. Addressing issues of walls, people, movements and containment as 'reproductive politics' in the broadest sense, Ros characteristically mapped out an ambitious new model of how we might theorise containment as reproductive control, and resistance as a reproductive insurrection. Her lecture was followed by a moving half day workshop with close colleagues Sonia Correa and Marge Berer that re-examined the long histories of reproductive rights activism and writing.
The Second Annual ReproSoc Public Lecture 2016
Cosmopolitan Conceptions in Global Dubai, A Reprolexicon for 21st Century Reprotravel
Marcia Inhorn
In her lecture, Marcia Inhorn, one of the world's leading medical anthropologists, explored the global market in fertility services drawing on her many years of fieldwork in Dubai -- now a major hub of assisted reproductive technology (ART). By exploring the demanding and complex journeys of 220 'reprotravellers' from 50 countries to Dubai's 'cosmopolitan' fertility centres, Inhorn argued we underestimate the costs of these often disappointing fertility odysseys, leading her to call for new forms of activism to address unmet reproductive health needs.
The First Annual ReproSoc Public Lecture 2015
The Egg and the Sperm 2.0
Emily Martin
Our annual public lecture was held in October at the stunning Sainsbury Laboratory. We were delighted to have Emily Martin present her recent work, an update on her 1991 paper "The Egg and the Sperm".