From reproductive mobilities to reproductive geopolitics
How can we conceptualize travel in search of fertility treatment? While current research on transnational reproduction mostly conceptualizes mobility as horizontal movement from A to B, I have argued (Schurr 2019) that we need to think of reproductive mobilities as multiple as horizontal mobilities converge, contradict, and are interdependent with other forms of mobility; namely vertical mobilities in terms of social upward and downward mobility, representational mobilities in form of imaginative geographies, and the actual embodied experiences of mobility. In this talk, I push the argument further, calling for the need to pay closer attention to the geopolitical and geoeconomic contexts in which these multiple reproductive mobilities take place. Linking reproductive life to geopolitics, I start from the assumption that reproductive technologies and the mobilities they create are caught up in geopolitics when individuals, states, international organisations, transnational corporations, and religious and nongovernmental organisations define whose reproduction counts as desirable and whose bodies are discarded as disposable. The talk draws on critical mobility studies and feminist geopolitics to develop the notion of reproductive geopolitics and show its potential for studying reproductive mobilities.
Date: 13 October 2022, 15:30 (Thursday, 1st week, Michaelmas 2022)
Venue: 64 Banbury Road, 64 Banbury Road OX2 6PN
Venue Details: Wheelchair accessible
Speaker: Carolin Schurr (University of Bern)
Organising department: Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS)
Organiser: Madeleine Reeves (University of Oxford)
Organiser contact email address: info@compas.ox.ac.uk
Booking required?: Recommended
Booking url: https://zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEvcuCprjkrGdamfq4raXGbtkaUHzDcVzPr
Cost: Free
Audience: Public
Editor: Nathan Grassi