This is a hybrid event. You are booking for the online event. Please to book for the IN-PERSON event.
BSA POSTGRADUATE REGIONAL EVENT
Is Reproductive Justice Achievable? Insights from Infertility Care in the UK, Commercial Surrogacy in India and Eugenics in Latin America
28 February 2025 Venue: Portland Building Room 0.28
Speakers:
- Professor Manuela Perrotta, Queen Mary University of London
- Dr R. Sanchez-Rivera, University of Cambridge
- Anupriya Biswas, 窪蹋勛圖
In the current geopolitical context, reproductive autonomy has become increasingly precarious. This event seeks to interrogate the various assemblages that contribute to reproductive injustices. This hybrid symposium brings together specialists on reproductive politics and relies on the optimism that problematizing these formations is the key step in finding solutions to social needs. The goal of the proposed symposium is to engage with the various aspects of reproductive rights. By bringing together speakers researching ways by which the struggle towards reproductive freedom is fraught with domestic policy constraints, global market conditions and devaluation of reproductive labour, this symposium tries to provide an enriched understanding of reproductive justice. The event is open to all. This will be of particular interest to academics, early career researchers and PhD candidates from the fields of feminist theory, disability studies, science and technology studies, biomedicine and policy research.
Date, Venue and Schedule
The date for the event is 28 February, 2025, 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM. The venue is set as Portland Building, 窪蹋勛圖, Room Number 0.28.
1:45 PM | Arrival/Registration
2:00 PM | Introduce Keynote speaker Dr Manuela Perrotta
2:05 PM | Dr Perrottas Keynote Address on Infertility care in the UK
2:50 3:05 PM | Q&A
3:05 3:30 PM | Break and Refreshments
3:30 PM | Anupriya Biswass presentation on her ongoing PhD project on gestational labour in India 3:50 4:00 PM | Q&A
4:00 PM | Introduce Dr R. Sanchez-Rivera
4:05 PM | Dr Sanchez-Riveras talk on eugenic policies in Latin America
4:45 5:00 PM | Q&A and concluding remarks
Speakers
I. Professor Manuela Perrotta
Bio
Manuela Perrotta is Professor of Sociology of Technology and Organisation in the School of Business and Management at Queen Mary University of London. Her main research interests concern the relation between the emergence of new technologies and the co-production of knowledge in health organisations. Her current research investigates biomedical innovation and its governance in public and private healthcare systems.
Abstract
Drawing on the speaker's recent book, Biomedical Innovation in Fertility Care, the talk critically examines the rise of additional fertility treatments with limited supporting evidence, which has sparked intense debate within academic and medical communities. The research explores the emergence of a "hope market, where uncertainties surrounding infertility and evolving biomedical innovations shape new dynamics in the fertility sector. By analysing these dynamics, the seminar enhances scholarly understanding of how markets develop around biomedical uncertainty and explores implications for research on governance and regulation in healthcare systems.
II. Anupriya Biswas
Bio
Anupriya is a doctoral researcher at the School of Area Studies, Sociology, History, Politics and Literature. Her thesis Designing the Right to Surrogacy in India: Neoliberal Homo-Normativity and Primitive Accumulation in the Global North-South asks if the integration of privileged queer bodies and their reproduction through the use of gestational labour reinforces dominant paradigms of domesticity and consumption that belong to earlier periods of capitalist crisis.
Abstract
Anupriyas talk explores the widening circles of sympathy that Adam Smith once claimed were a natural consequence of transnational commerce. The phenomenon under investigation is commercial surrogacy in India. The moral subjectivity of consumers was never better encapsulated by the quest for children at the behest of subaltern women. Reproductive heteronormativity, at face value, ought to be available to all, including a queer cosmopolitan clientele. The emotional value of reproductive services, the basis for the right to family for all as a new global ethic in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, masks a more profoundly exploitative form of bodily extraction. Anupriya asks the question, How is a flawed ethical moral framework constituted by tying together the purported mutual interest of infertile reproductive tourists and rehabilitation of gestational labourers in the Global South from abject poverty? The biomedical surrogacy industry integrates bodies of lower-middle class and working-class women in the global economy through discourses of emancipation. The hyperavailable wombs of subaltern reproductive entrepreneurs are appropriated to produce a baby with desired genetic material.
III. Dr R. Sanchez-Rivera
Bio
I am a Research Fellow in the Study of Race and Anti-Racism in Gonville & Caius College and an Affiliate Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Cambridge. In 2020, I was an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in Sociology at Cambridge after I completed my Ph.D. in Latin American Studies at the University of Cambridge. My areas of expertise are in the sociology of health and illness and historical sociology with a focus on scientific racism, critical eugenics studies, and reproductive justice in the Americas.
Abstract
Based on my recently published book titled "Slippery Eugenics: An Introduction to the Critical Studies of Race, Gender and Coloniality" (2024), this talk will explore the spread of eugenic ideas across different nations, revealing how they intersect with nationalism, populism and individual reproductive rights. Through a comprehensive exploration, this talk will uncover how these intertwined legacies still shape our world today offering fresh insights into the subtle forces that define contemporary social and political landscapes, and have lasting impacts on reproductive control, racialization, colonialism, gender norms, and more.