Asia brown bag lecture: Ayo Wahlberg

NIAS and ADI invite you to a brown bag lecture by Ayo Wahlberg from the Department of Anthroplogy.

Routinising reproductive technologies in China

This paper explores how assisted reproductive technologies (ART) were able to become an established part of China’s highly regulated reproductive complex, otherwise configured to strictly restrict fertility. While some scholars have pointed to processes of globalization and standardization as drivers of a “wholesale exportation of Western-generated new reproductive technologies into the developing world”, I suggest that more analytical traction can be gained from shifting attention to processes of routinization. With the term routinization I point, on the one hand, to socio-historical processes whereby certain forms of medical technology come to be (re-)produced and entrenched within particular juridical, medical, social, economic, cultural, institutional, etc. configurations. And, on the other hand, I refer to all those daily practices through which certain forms of medical technology become an established part of health delivery - there is a daily grind to the emergence of any medical technology. Rather than as the result of some kind of inevitable globalization process, I argue that we must locate the rise of assisted reproduction within China’s reproductive socio-technical imaginaries (cf. Jasanoff and Kim). Following initial resistance, assisted reproduction has gone on to be championed as a national project that can help not only infertile couples, but also the nation itself.

Time: 2 October, 12:00-13:00
Place: NIAS, CSS, room 18.1.08

Feel free to bring your own lunch. There will be coffee/tea.

Coming brown bag lectures:
Ravinder Kaur, 12 November