Biography
Hannah Gibson is a PhD Candidate in Cultural Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Originally from Scotland, Hannah has lived for a long time and done all of her tertiary education in New Zealand. For her PhD she is researching surrogacy in a New Zealand context, exploring the ways that intended parents and surrogates rebel against or conform to strict reproductive regulations through their every day reproductive practices. This sits within a wider discourse about the various ways that people make families, either through medical intervention or a deliberate, oftentimes necessary step away from assisted reproductive technology. For her undergraduate degree, Hannah studied Social Anthropology and Spanish, with an extended semester spent studying in Spain. Subsequently she completed a BA (Hons) where she spent ten weeks with an equine assisted psychotherapy organisation to understand how the therapy works, which introduced her to multispecies ethnography alongside medical anthropology. As well as doing her PhD, she edits a series for Somatosphere, and is active in the disability community to raise awareness around diversity and equality.
Her key interests are in medical and reproductive anthropology, surrogacy, anthropology of law vis a vis kinship studies, multispecies ethnography, psychological anthropology and disability studies.
