Events
Cosponsors
- The Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities | Columbia University
- Institute for Comparative Literature and Society
Organizer
- Motherhood and Technology Group
Contact
email address [email protected]
Notes
- Free and open to the public
- Registration required. See details.
- To register, please email [email protected].
A conference hosted by the Motherhood and Technology Working Group at the Center for the Study of Social Difference on the theme of "Conception and Its Discontents."
Medical technologies have radically transformed the biological and social experience of motherhood. Advances in genomic and reproductive care, the circulation of novel kinship structures, the entrenchment of existing global networks of power and privilege, and the politics of contested bodily sites mark this emerging constellation.
Technological advancements have in particular impacted not just the understanding of conception, but the very process by which a human embryo is created, implanted, and matured. Egg freezing, embryo storage, IVF, and surrogacy afford women new freedoms in choosing when and how to become mothers, while also raising troubling questions about the pressures of capitalism and the extension of worklife, as well as the global inequalities present in the experience of motherhood. In addition, technologies have arisen allowing for unprecedented control over not just who becomes a mother, but what kind of embryo is allowed to be implanted and to grow. Technologies such as CRISPR and NIPT have re-introduced the question of eugenics, radically shifting the very epistemology of motherhood and what it means to be “expecting.” And contemporary abortion debates draw on technology in order to make arguments both for and against access, with imaging technologies being instrumentalized in the building of a sympathetic case for the unborn, and the very notion of a “heartbeat bill” reliant on the misreading of technologies for measuring fetal activity.
While these problems are urgent today, questions of conception and technology are by no means recent developments. The 18th century saw a flourishing of philosophical and scientific theories regarding the start of human life and its formation within the womb. Such theories relied on modern technologies, such as autopsy, to atomize and visualize the body. In the 19th and 20th centuries, eugenic medical science produced theories of reproductive difference between differing racial and social groups, leading to forced sterilization laws in both the US and in Germany. This long history of racializing the rhetoric of fertility and motherhood continues to influence political debates on immigration and demographic changes in the present.
Please email [email protected] to request disability accommodations. Advance notice is necessary to arrange for some accessibility needs
Program
time8:30am - 8:45am EDT
Coffee
time8:45am - 9:00am EDT
Welcome
Rishi Goyal
Director of Medical Humanities at ICLS; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine
Columbia University
Arden Hegele
Lecturer in the Discipline of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
time9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Surrogacy: Perils and Pitfalls of the 2021 NY State Law Permitting Commercial Gestational Surrogacy
Not Your Grandmother’s Surrogacy: Looking Back to Better Move Forward
Nancy Reame
Department of Nursing
Columbia University
Concerns and Recommendations for Legislative Amendments to Improve the Rights of All Third-Party Participants in Commercial Gestational Surrogacy in NY State
Wendy Chavkin
Mailman School of Public Health
Columbia University
Linda Kahn
NYU School of Medicine
New York University
Surrogacy360: a Global Perspective on Commercial Surrogacy
Diana Namumbejja Abwoye
Author
Our Bodies, Ourselves Today
What Can New York Learn from Surrogacy in Ukraine and Canada?
Alison Motluk
Freelance journalist
Must We Be Pragmatists?
Yasmine Ergas
School of International and Public Affairs
Columbia University
CHAIR
Nancy Reame
Columbia University School of Nursing
time10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Coffee
time11:00am - 12:30pm EDT
Historical Perspectives on Conception
The Ensoulment of the Embryo in the Passive Receptacle of the Mother: Philosophical Views of Embryology in Aristotle, Galen, Aquinas, and Dante
Chas Firestone East
Ph.D. candidate in Italian and Comparative Literature and Society
Columbia University
Latin, Spices, Dates, and Pregnancy: An Intersectional Reading of Early Modern Domestic Medical Recipes
Mansi Garneni
Undergraduate
Columbia University
The Missionary’s Position: Pursuing Abortion Doctors in Colonial India
Niyati Shenoy
Ph.D. student in in the Department of Middle Eastern, South Asian and African Studies
Columbia University
Forget It: A Literary History of IUDs
Lilith Todd
Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
The Great Replacement: Conspiracy Theory, Reproductive Anxiety, and Self-Help in the Alt-Right Manosphere
Aya Labanieh (
Columbia University
CHAIR
Julie Crawford
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
time12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
Lunch (onsite)
time1:30pm - 3:00pm EDT
Technologies of Reproduction
Algorithms, Apps, and Abortion: U.S. Law and Pregnancy in the Age of Data Privacy
Rosemary O’Mahony
Columbia University
Immaterial Intimacy: Digital, Neoliberal Labor in Reproductive Justice Direct Service Organizing
Jessica Gantt-Shafer
Assistant Professor of Communication
University of Missouri-Kansas City
Imaging the Digital Native: Ultrasound Technology in the History of Personal Computation
Rose Rowson
Ph.D. candidate in the Modern Culture and Media Department
Brown University
Follicular Speculation
Stefanie Sobelle
Associate Professor of English
Gettysburg College
time3:00pm - 3:30pm EDT
Coffee
time3:30pm - 5:30pm EDT
Exploring Canadians’ Experiences of Assisted Reproduction: A Snapshot of Current Empirical Research Studies
Surrogacy Laws in Canada: Exploring Intended Parents’ Experiences and Perspectives
Stefanie Carsley
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law
University of Ottawa
Surrogates’ Voices: Exploring Surrogates’ Experiences and Insights
Vanessa Gruben
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law
University of Ottawa
Stefanie Carsley
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law
University of Ottawa
Alana Cattapan
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of Waterloo
Ova Obscura: Egg Donors in Canada
Alana Cattapan
Assistant Professor of Political Science
University of Waterloo
Vanessa Gruben
Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law
University of Ottawa
Kathleen Hammond
Assistant Professor in the Lincoln Alexander School of Law
Toronto Metropolitan University
Elective Egg Freezing in Canada: Towards Appropriate Regulation Governing Consent
Kathleen Hammond
Assistant Professor in the Lincoln Alexander School of Law
Toronto Metropolitan University
Alana Cattapan
Assistant Professor of Political Science
CHAIR
Stefanie Carsley
Faculty of Law
University of Ottawa
time5:30pm - 6:15pm EDT
Wine and Cheese Reception at Heyman Center
time8:30am - 9:00am EDT
Coffee
time9:00am - 10:30am EDT
Testing and the Law from Conception to Birth
Pregnancy Testing Before and After Roe
Karen Weingarten
Associate Professor of English
Queens College, City University of New York
Sex in Limbo: NIPT and the (in)Determination of Fetal Sex in Belgium
Shana Riethof
ULiège
Misreading Medicine: Statutory Prohibitions of Abortion for Disability
Megan Glasmann
Third year law student at S.J. Quinney College of Law
University of Utah
CHAIR
Rishi Goyal
Director of Medical Humanities at ICLS; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine
Columbia University
time10:30am - 11:00am EDT
Coffee
time11:00am - 12:30pm EDT
Narrative and Cultural Technologies of Reproduction
Products of Conception, Imaging, and Imagining the Maternal-Foetal Relationship
Sabina Dosani
doctoral researcher in Creative and Critical Writing
University of East Anglia
The Disabled (M)other: Critiquing Cultural Constructions of Motherhood in the Age of the ‘Post-Nuclear’ Family
Jess Gallagher
Human Rights Studies Masters student
Columbia University
The Experiences of Pregnancy, Delivery, and Newborn Parenting during COVID-19 as Understood through Metaphor
Laura Crook
Masters student in English & Comparative Literature
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Self-Unveiling: Techno-Maternal Ambiguities in Contemporary Visual Arts
Diana Novaceanu
PhD Student
University of Bucharest
CHAIR
Emily C. Bloom
Department of Literature
Sarah Lawrence College
time12:30pm - 1:30pm EDT
Closing Remarks and Lunch
(vegan/gluten-free options available)
time1:30pm - 3:30pm EDT
Closed Session 1: Motherhood and Technology Working Group
On Authority: Disability, Gender Reveal Parties, and My Daughter
George Estreich
Instructor at the School of Writing, Literature, and Film
Oregon State University
Seahorse Fathers and Legal Mothers
Jennifer Luong
Lawyer
Above Average: A Somewhat True Comic Story of Parenting, Disability, and Technology
Rachel Adams
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
CHAIR
Rishi Goyal
Director of Medical Humanities at ICLS; Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine
Columbia University
time3:30pm - 4:00pm EDT
Coffee
time4:00pm - 6:00pm EDT
Closed Session 2: Motherhood and Technology Working Group
Abject Motherhood: Unica Zürn and Pregnancy in the Shadow of Nazi Eugenics
Skye Savage
Ph.D. student in Germanic Languages
Columbia University
Wilful Misreadings of Ectopic Pregnancy in the Eighteenth and Twenty-First Centuries
Katherine Bergevin
PhD Candidate in English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
CHAIR
Arden Hegele
Lecturer in the Discipline of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University
time6:00pm EDT