"Remaking Reproduction" Conference, University of Cambridge, UK

Following a month in residence at Cambridge as a visiting scholar of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group, I joined 160+ scholars for a stimulating 3-day conference on the global politics of reproductive technologies. Check out the awesome schedule here:

 www.reprocnf.sociology.cam.ac.uk/

I presented a paper entitled "Accounting for Life: Claiming Embryo Potential After IVF." Here's what it was about:

​​Scholars of reproductive technologies are paying increasing attention to financial logics within IVF and its interface with stem cell research. In Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby’s (2014) analysis of clinical labor, they observed “uncanny hybridities of money, speculation, financialization, and in vitro tissues” within global tissue economies that are driven by desires to generate forms of value perceived to be latent within reproductive entities. Since the derivation of human embryonic stem cells in 1998, excess embryos left over from IVF and frozen for future have become a precious resource for stem cell researchers whose practices illustrate the uncanny hybridities of finance and reproductive remainder economies. Yet in addition to the expanding financial logics at the IVF-stem cell interface, more mundane accounting practices are at work too. Drawing on ethnographic research in a human embryo biobank based in a California university research lab, this paper analyzes one family’s donation of a diseased embryo for stem cell research that strives to “account for life” through care and cure. At the same time the donors hoped that their embryo could accelerate research toward a cure for the disease affecting their daughter and others in their community, they filed an unprecedented income tax exemption form to the United States Internal Revenue Service with an appraisal report estimating the value of the diseased embryo—a strategy they hoped could provide financial support in caring for their daughter. Such accounting practices may broaden how scholars of reproductive technologies examine the financialization of reproductive and regenerative medicine by reminding us to not overlook the banal, but no less speculative, instruments used to account for reproductive labor.