Reproduction entails practices of life-making and life-sustaining toward imagined future worlds. Reproduction is integral to contemporary politics, involving contestations across the globe about reproductive practices, how to sustain habitable and dignified life, and what the future world should look like. Reproduction is central to social, political, and economic life and central to social analysis and social theory, covering issues as varied as the rights to abortion and contraception, the medicalisation of birth, the rights of queer families, assisted reproductive technologies, race and class in reproductive labour, and the economic and racial stratification of reproductive health.
But which scholars and whose reproductive lives are centred? These questions challenge us to rethink the conceptual toolkit of social theory. From where we are situated in Southern Africa, reproduction often remains overdetermined by powerful and moralising frameworks within biomedicine, global health, development, and climate change. This conference presents an opportunity to reconsider US and Eurocentric hegemony in the production of knowledge within reproductive studies.
This international conference aims to include a multiplicity of reproductive worlds, practices, and futures, alongside a reflexive analysis of the structures and politics that shape reproductive studies itself. The title of the conference takes its name from Sabelo J Ndlovu-Gatsheni’s (2023) recent essay, where he points to the reproduction of the “coloniser’s model of the world” through a cognitive empire. We take inspiration from his appeal to “re-world” from the Global South, a process and practice of world-making (worlding) via “knowledge, power, resistance, and dreams of freedom.” We welcome contributions across a range of disciplines in reproductive studies, including anthropology, sociology, public health, science and technology studies, and queer, ethnic, and gender studies. We aim to foreground Global South scholarship, their/our contributions to challenging hegemonic framings of reproduction in social theory, and highlighting work that disrupts powerful narratives in biomedicine, health policy, and social discourse.
We invite submissions in the following formats:
We will be running parallel sessions. Submissions should address one of the following themes:
All submissions are due 15 February 2024. Please visit our FAQ page for information, such as scholarships, language of presentation, and on our plans for an Early Career Scholar Workshop. For any further questions, please contact [email protected].