Katie Dow and Janelle Lamoreaux
Reproducing the Environment is a collaborative project led by Katie Dow and Janelle Lamoreaux (University of Arizona). The project brings together scholars working on the diverse and important intersections between reproduction and the environment in many different parts of the world and in different species. It grew out of a shared interest in how both ideas about and human effects on the environment can affect how we, and other species, reproduce. It is specifically interested in looking at how reproduction and the environment intersect, so for example how assisted reproductive technologies are being used to prevent species extinction and to improve food security, or how environmental conditions impact on the ability to conceive and care for future generations. More broadly, we are interested in exploring how ideas about reproduction and the environment express ethical and political concerns about the future, the quality of people’s lives and inequalities between and within different countries.
The project is interdisciplinary and global in scope. We are approaching the topic openly and seek to include a range of priorities and viewpoints from our fellow collaborators. We take a critical approach that incorporates intersectional feminist, queer and environmental justice perspectives and questions normative assumptions about both reproduction and the environment.
Activities for this project include a panel, which was sponsored by the Anthropology & Environment and the Medical Anthropology sections of the American Anthropological Association at their 2015 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. A second panel on the same theme took place at the Royal Anthropological Institute’s conference on climate change in London in May 2016. This was followed up by a workshop in Cambridge in June 2017, which was sponsored by CRASSH and ReproSoc.
Katie and Janelle are currently both developing new ethnographic research projects that engage closely with the reproducing the environment theme, from the use of IVF and cryopreservation techniques in endangered coral populations, to informal seed saving networks. This project will also inform the In/Fertile Environments work package of the Wellcome Trust-funded project, Changing (In)Fertilities that Katie is coordinating. We are also developing several public engagement projects, so watch this space for more soon!
Publications
Dow, K. and Lamoreaux, L. (2020). "Situated Kinmaking: Towards Environmental Reproductive Justice", Environmental Humanities. 12 (2): 475-491.
Dow, K. (2020) Under Commission. Review of Kroløkke, C. (2018), "Global Fluids: The Cultural Politics of Reproductive Waste and Value", Berghahn Books. Medical Anthropology Quarterly.