Reproductive Uncertainties and Imagined Futures in the Anthropocene

Datum
01. Sep­tem­ber 2025 

STS-CH Con­fer­ence in Zurich, Switzerland

Pan­el: „Repro­duc­tive Uncer­tain­ties and Imag­ined Futures in the Anthropocene”
STS-CH Con­fer­ence this com­ing Sep­tem­ber in Zurich

Pan­el Description:
Uncer­tain­ty per­me­ates every aspect of human repro­duc­tion. Humans have tried to con­trol this bio­log­i­cal uncer­tain­ty through var­i­ous techno­sci­en­tif­ic, and sociopo­lit­i­cal mea­sures as illus­trat­ed through the vast land­scape of assist­ed repro­duc­tive tech­nolo­gies, birth con­trol tech­nolo­gies and relat­ed dynam­ic reg­u­la­tions sur­round­ing their use in the Glob­al South and North. In light of this, fol­low­ing Jasanoff and Kim’s (2015) for­mu­la­tion of ‘sociotech­ni­cal imag­i­nar­ies’ and Gins­burg and Rapp’s (2020) refram­ing using the „cul­tur­al work of repro­duc­tion” as „repro­duc­tive imag­i­nar­ies”, we ask what role repro­duc­tion-relat­ed tech­nolo­gies such as but not lim­it­ed to IVF, birth con­trol and ster­il­iza­tion tech­niques, play in the con­sti­tu­tion of par­tic­u­lar­ized con­tex­tu­al ‘repro­duc­tive imaginaries’? 

Using repro­duc­tive uncer­tain­ty as our start­ing point, in this pan­el, we ask how these repro­duc­tive things and peo­ple „hold togeth­er” to cre­ate or resist change. Giv­en that, repro­duc­tive goals change con­sid­er­ably, both at indi­vid­ual and state lev­el, how are ‘repro­duc­tive imag­i­nar­ies’ informed and in turn inform indi­vid­ual and col­lec­tive orga­niz­ing around lived and future lives- for e.g., in the child free and pro-life move­ments with respect to the cli­mate crises? How do peo­ple involve ‘repro­duc­tive imag­i­nar­ies’ to make sense of their worlds when impact­ed by the diag­no­sis of infer­til­i­ty? What sal­va­tion­ary or harm­ful aspects of these repro­duc­tive tech­nolo­gies are high­light­ed to bring cer­tain ‘repro­duc­tive imag­i­nar­ies’ to fruition while oth­ers are down­played? And what are the effects of such envi­sioned futures, both at state and indi­vid­ual lev­els? We invite papers across dis­ci­plines that con­tribute to this dis­cus­sion on the entan­gle­ments of state, indi­vid­ual and repro­duc­tive tech­nolo­gies in pro­duc­ing „repro­duc­tive imagineries”.

Pan­el Details:

🔹Abstract Dead­line: May 9, 2025
🔹Max Abstract Length: 300 words
🔹Sub­mit here: Sub­mis­sion Portal
🔹Full Pan­el Abstract: https://express.converia.de/frontend/index.php?page_id=47357#panel-125457