September 2013: Conference Contesting Fertilities, Families, and Sexualities

Since the beginning of the 1990s many insightful studies on the social and cultural conditions and effects of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) have been published. Pioneering anthropological research has been done by Marilyn Strathern, Jeanette Edwards, Sarah Franklin and Monika Konrad in the UK, next to important work about the US by Gay Becker and Charis Thompson. Further pioneering work has been conducted by Marcia Inhorn on Egypt, Susan Kahn on Israel, Anne Cadoret on France and Brigitte Hauser-Schäublin on Germany. After more than twenty years of the proliferation of social research on ARTs, it is time to reconsider concepts such as fertility, human reproduction, family and gender in the light of the development of gender and queer studies, recent kinship studies, religious studies, medical anthropology, bioethics, history of medicine and science and technology studies.

Social and historical research on ARTs is a rather new field in the Swiss context, meaning studies at Swiss universities about the Swiss situation on the one hand and about ARTs in other countries on the other hand. Current research in this context shows the highly contested character of potential innovations of ideas and practices around fertility, kinship and family relatedness, gender and personhood, religion and law through ARTs. With its focus on research conducted in Switzerland including a transnational outlook, this conference provides interesting clues for discussing the current state of the art, for reconfiguring theoretical concepts, and for creating new issues and directions of research in this field.

This conference starts from the research projects “Fertility and Family in Switzerland. Local Processes of Reproduction and Kinship in Transnational Contexts of Biomedical Technologies” (2010-2013) funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), and “Assisted Reproductive Technologies in Iran from an Anthropological Perspective: Legal and Jurisprudential Responses and Social Dynamics (2009-2012) funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) and is linked to the work of international scholars from different social and historical disciplines. The speakers will present a wide range of topics, including transnational, legal, economic and religious or moral-ethical dimensions: theoretical assumptions and analytical concepts of fertility, family, kinship, gender, sexuality and age; ARTs in Switzerland with regard to fertility and the building of families as well as other networks of care; and ARTs beyond Switzerland related to nationhood, kinship, law and religion. Especially the topics of ARTs and fertility, ARTs and non-nuclear configurations of care, ARTs and age, as well as ARTs and the dynamics of nation, law, morality and religion are still understudied in the social and historical sciences. The conference features three panels organized around the following questions.

Thursday, September 5, 2013

Friday, September 6, 2013