Dear all,
please find below the announcement for the East and Inner Asia
Seminar this Thursday at the LSE.
all best,
Hans Steinmuller
Anthropology of East and Inner Asia Seminar
Thursday 13 March
4.00pm - 6.00pm
Seligman Library A607
Old Building, LSE
The Concept of 'Quality' in Reproductive Medicine in China
Ayo Wahlberg, BIOS Centre, London School of Economics
In recent decades, reproductive politics in China have become mostly
known and debated in Europe in terms of restriction and prevention –
'one child policy', managing population growth, pre-marital medical
counselling, 'new eugenics', etc. In this paper, I ask how this
emphasis on restriction and prevention squares with a dramatic rise in
efforts to promote and enable reproduction through fertility treatment
since March 1988, when Zheng Mengzhu (China's first IVF-assisted baby)
was born. Focusing on an urban Chinese context, I will in particular
examine how different concepts of 'quality' (质量 zhì liàng and 素质
sù zhì in particular) inform and organise the practice and provision
of reproductive medicine as a way to explore what kinds of normative
assessments of 'good life' are at stake. I will suggest that
estimations of what an 'excellent quality' (优质 yōu zhì) gamete or
embryo, a 'superior birth' (优生 yōu shēng) and a 'good quality of
life' (优生活质量 yōu shēng huó zhì liàng) consist of are inextricably
bound in the clinical fertility treatment process.
Ayo Wahlberg is a Research Fellow with BIONET, a Chinese-European
collaboration on the ethical governance of biomedical and biological
research (http://www.bionet-china.org/). He holds a PhD in Sociology
and an MSc in International Development Studies.
Convenors: Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen, James Johnston, Hans Steinmuller.
For further information about the East and Inner Asia Seminar
programme please contact Hans Steinmuller ([log in to unmask]).
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