Historicizing Reproduction

The Historicizing Reproduction project was led by TRU member Martina Schluender in collaboration with
M. Murphy.  This project historicized the shifts and moves undergone by “reproduction“ as it moved from a concept that described a pregiven capacity fixed in “life” and defining matter as “living” to a capacity apprehended through technoscience and open to transformation. The project focused on the 20th century as a central period when the “technoscience turn” in reproduction took place. To historicize reproduction means to investigate reproductive practices from a broad, interdisciplinary framework, based on a comparative epistemological approach. This implies transgressing transnational and traditional comparative accounts still working under the assumption of a unique and universal western epistemology. The project foregrounded these themes by focusing on three domains of reproductive sciences and their entanglements: obstetrics and the emergence of reproductive medicine, agriculture and livestock breeding, and those fields that explore aggregate forms of life, such as public health, the global health movement, and international feminism with a specific emphasis on the relation between western and non-western countries. This Project was funded by a EU Marie Curie Fellowship.