The 2013-2014 STS Seminar Series continues on March 18 with a talk from University of Cambridge sociology Professor Sarah Franklin.
Franklin’s presentation will take place from 12:30-2pm in 320 Bethune College and is titled “After IVF: The New Anthropology of Reproduction”. She will review more than two decades of anthropological work on new reproductive technologies to consider what the “reproductive turn” in anthropology has revealed, and how certain questions have changed as a consequence. A key question structuring this thought experiment is how anthropological understandings of technology have been altered by the focus on techniques such as IVF.
Franklin has published extensively on the social aspects of new reproductive technologies. She has conducted fieldwork on IVF, cloning, pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), and stem cells. Her work combines traditional anthropological approaches, including both ethnographic methods and kinship theory, with more recent approaches from science studies, gender theory, and cultural studies.
The 2013-2014 Research Seminar Series in Science & Technology Studies explores the roles of instruments and media as investigators of organic worlds at various scales and in various settings. The sites of these experimental investigations are examined to highlight the social roles, scenes and the actors engaged in these inquiries.
For the full calendar, visit the the Research Seminar Series in Science and Technology Studies website. The STS Seminar Series is sponsored by Situating Science Cluster Grant, iSTS, Department of Natural Science, Faculty of Fine Arts, Faculty of Liberal Arts and Professional Studies, Faculty of Science, Bethune College, and the Canadian Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture.
The seminar is free and open to the public.