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Call for Participants
Interdisciplinary Workshop
Reproductive Mobilities:
Dialogue, Exchange, and New Research Directions
August 9-10, 2018
Kelowna, BC, Canada
Organizers: Sue Frohlick (UBC), Amy Speier (University of Texas, Arlington), and Kristin Lozanski (King's University College)
Keynote Speaker: Michal Nahman (University of the West of England)
Discussant: Mimi Sheller (Drexel University)

A two-day workshop, to be held August 9-10 at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan Campus, will bring together scholars from the social sciences and humanities working in areas including reproductive tourism, reproductive justice, biopolitics, citizenship and migration, reproductive technologies, abortion or birth control travel, and cross border reproduction. The purpose of the workshop is to provide a forum for interdisciplinary exchange of knowledge and expertise between anthropologists, sociologists, gender and sexuality studies, and other scholars addressing issues that are broadly related to the globalization of reproduction from a feminist mobilities framework. We hope to facilitate a conversation between fields of diverse research in order to forge a collective path forward for research and scholarship at the intersection of critical reproduction studies and critical mobilities studies. We seek to draw out theoretical, political, ethical, and empirical questions related to how reproduction and mobilities are mutually constitutive and are playing out in uneven, complex, and precarious ways in the 21st century.
Building on decades of research in the global politics of reproduction launched by Ginsburg and Rapp's Conceiving the New World Order (1995) and recent scholarship in the burgeoning field of reproductive tourism that has focused largely on surrogacy and egg donation (Nahman 2016), we aim to shift the dialogue in a different direction by honing in on mobility as a potential analytic for the study of contemporary reproductive practices, affects, subjectivities, and politics. We feel there is something to be gained by looking at how reproductive practices are not only shaped by global flows and movement of people, products, and technologies but also at how reproduction mobilizes mobility, that is, people to move across borders and to wait, stay, or go back and forth. How reproduction - as desire or imperative -affects or animates human geographical and spatial mobility hasn't yet received much attention.
Selected participants will have the opportunity to present current research related to the workshop theme and to network with other participants for the purpose of publications, future research collaborations, and the formation of an international research network in the broadly conceptualized and nascent area of reproductive mobilities. We are actively pursuing a possible publication with Mobilities as a special issue. All travel expenses will be covered. If you are interested, please submit, no later than March 23rd:

  *   your name and affiliation
  *   a title and 200 word abstract for a longer paper, which will be due July 1st
  *   a brief bio including recent publications
to: [log in to unmask]

This workshop is funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) Connection Grant Program.