Workshop Description (pdf)

The workshop "IVF as Global Form - Ethnographic Knowledge and the Transnationalization of Reproductive Technologies" uses the 30th anniversary of the birth of Louise Joy Brown, the first human being conceived by in-vitro-fertilization, as an opportunity to reflect on the world encompassing spread of so called assisted reproductive technologies, on the emerging transnationalization of reproduction and on the diversity of social, ethical, economical, cultural and political forms which accompany reproductive technologies in different contexts of appropriation. The workshop brings together anthropologists, STS-researchers and ethnographers, who have researched reproductive technologies as they are practiced and lived in diverse settings such as Great Britain and Austria, Sri Lanka and Israel, Lebanon and Sweden, in gay and hetero-normative surroundings, in public and private hospitals and along the edges of affluence that separate East and West, North and South. Its focus is not so much directed on comparison as such as on the question, how dense and detailed ethnographic knowledge, interactively produced in very different situations and regions, mobilized by multi sited research and re-linked by our coming together, can enhance the understanding of the globalization of biomedical technologies and invigorate the analysis of global forms.


The workshop will present and discuss work that focuses on one or more of the following interrelated aspects:

1. Localizing IVF assemblages

Reproductive technologies have rapidly spread across various kinds of boundaries and into socially and culturally diverse settings and regions. Large parts of their infrastructural conditions are transnationally organized and connected to worldwide flows of capital, pharmaceutics, education, gametes etc. in uneven ways. Their legal regulation, however, is still predominantly carried out by nationally organized institutions and interests. This has led to a wide range of bans and approvals as well as to considerable differences in clinical practice, public or privat financing and ethical reasoning. In some parts of the world, processes such as Europeanization have recently started to reduce national differences. The very particularities and specificities of IVF-practices, their significances and meanings result from local entanglements within heterogeneous assemblages that can only be studied in concrete places and from the perspective of the various actors involved.

Instead of starting with a simple dichotomy between global force and local response the workshop seeks to present ethnographic case studies of IVF and related technologies in diverse settings that combine an analysis of the local and the translocal as they are produced. IVF related practices could be conceptualized as forms of "awkward engagement" (Anna Tsing). Of special interest is the emergence of "national" IVF cultures as well as descriptions of the wide variety of solutions and logics, subjectivities and agencies that have developed in localized interactions with reproductive technologies.

2. Tracing the transnational scapes of reproductive technologies

IVF is articulated not only locally, but also in transnational configurations. Mobile users and practitioners, travelling substances, standards and equipment, long distance forms of cooperation between clinics and spermbanks, the activities of transnational consortiums, concerned groups and scientific institutions all create areas of accelerated agency that can be termed transnational "scapes" (Arjun Appaduarai) or "zones" (Andrew Barry) of reproductive technologies. Such figurations connect institutions, actors, materialities and practices across regional or national borders but take shape well below a global level. Ethnographic research along the routes of "reproductive tourism" (Sven Bergmann) or within transnational clusters of intensified clinical cooperation and infertility treatment has been taken up only recently.
The workshop intends to bring together those researchers that investigate transnational reproductive scapes in different world regions. It is especially interested in descriptions of the normativities, subjectivities, ethics and agencies developing in their framework. The boundaries of transnational reproductive scapes are difficult to draw. Their structures cannot be explained by simple centre and periphery patterns. It is therefore important to develop more adequate understandings of the complex ways in which transnational scapes of reproductive technologies are related to aspirations and ideas of Western and other modernities and how they contribute to the reproduction or renewed constitution of boundaries of knowledge, identification, access and distinction.

3. Ethnographic knowledge and the globalization of biotechnologies: reinvigorating theory

What happens, when detailed ethnographic case studies on living and working with IVF in diverse settings and scapes are laid out side by side and reviewed together? What kind of a "global picture" emerges, however tentatively it might be drawn, however fragmented and filled with gaps it might be? What patterns of distribution and resistance can be detected, what kinds of routine, order and unexpected fault lines can be observed? And what kind of questions emerge from the ethnographic record with respect to the spread of biotechnologies as global forms?
The workshop intends to strengthen a reflexive stance towards changing conditions of ethnographic knowledge production in the fields of reproductive technologies. It invites work that discusses the specificity and relevance of ethnographic knowledge and its representation with regard to public debates and society's decisions about reproductive technologies. The workshop further focuses on the theoretical consequences of ethnographic insights for contemporary understandings of globalizing biotechnologies. How, for example, does analytic attention to comparison and transfer as everyday practices in the field challenge existing theories of globalization? How do we, as producers of ethnographic case studies, relate to the fact that the bulk of popular media representations covering IVF also comes in the genre of (individualized) case studies which travel widely and often arrive in social spaces before the technologies themselves? How can we as researchers enhance an interactive analysis of "awkward engagements" with IVF? How does one proceed in the borderlands of STS and Social Anthropology - towards more adequate descriptions of IVF as global form?

Keynote speaker

We are very pleased to announce that the public opening keynote for the workshop will be given by Sarah Franklin, LSE London. (18:00, Thursday 12.6.2008)

Workshop language and conference proceedings

The conference language is English. A publication of selected papers is planned as an edited English language volume with Campus Verlag, Frankfurt am Main in joint venture with Chicago University Press 2009/2010.

Concept, organization and contact:

The workshop is organized by a team of researchers with Stefan Beck and Michi Knecht as principal investigators. For the last three years the team has been investigating the implications of reproductive technologies in Istanbul/Turkey and Berlin/Germany with regard to kinship, relatedness, knowledge politics and transnationalization as well as with a view on long term developments. (The project has received the tentative approval for further funding until 2012).

Contact and Information:

Sulamith Hamra (sulamith.hamra@staff.hu-berlin.de)
Collaborative Research Centre SFB 640
Humboldt-University Berlin
Mohrenstr. 40/41, D - 10117 Berlin
Phone: 00-49-30-20934912

Secretariat of the Department of European Ethnology
Humboldt-University Berlin
Mohrenstr. 40/41, D - 10117 Berlin
Phone: 00-49-30-2093-3703/ 3704

The workshop will take place at:

Department of European Ethnology
Humboldt-University Berlin,
Mohrenstr. 41, D - 10117 Berlin
Room 211 / 212 (2nd Floor)
Keynote: Room 311 (3rd Floor)

Sponsored by the German Research Foundation (DFG)