Workshop 5

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Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life

- Thinking with Posthumanist Feminist Theories

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Date: Monday, 25th March

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3-4.45pm - CACSSS Seminar Room O'Rahilly Building G27

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Stine Willum Adrian, Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University, Copenhagen

Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life - Thinking with Posthumanist Feminist Theories

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5-6.30pm - 'Film and Screen Media Centre' (Kane B10, Basement - end of corridor)

Screening of Donna Haraway - Story telling for earthly survival

 

         

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Speaker: Stine Adrian, Department of Learning and Philosophy, Aalborg University Copenhagen

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Technology of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life

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In this presentation I will introduce the project “Technologies of Death and Dying at The Beginning of Life”. Technologies used during pregnancies, births and at NICUs influence how the death of fetuses and infants take place, and how they are managed. Prenatal screening that has been offered to all Danish pregnant women since 2004 has changed which lives are ended, while a cooling cot, a cot with cooling elements introduced at birthing wards, has enabled families that have lost an infant to spent more time with the infant before the funeral. In this project the cases of late-term abortion and the deaths of infants suffering from severe malformations will be our focus as we ask: How does technology remake death and dying at the beginning of life? Combining ethnographic and legal methods we will inquire into how deaths at the beginning of life emerge and are managed through technologies, and how these deaths are lived with. In this presentation I will particularly focus on how we conceptualize and understand technology as part of remaking death, through drawing on posthuman feminist theory, taking a point of departure in agential realism (Barad, 2007) and Haraway's reconfiguration of technologies (1991).  

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Biography

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Since her PhD in Feminist STS and cultural analysis at Linköping University, Adrian has been working on the use of assisted reproductive technologies and how creations, materializations or emergence takes place as reproductive technologies are at use. Adrian’s work has made several contributions. Ethnographically, she has added depth in the field of assisted reproductive technologies in Denmark and Sweden. Methodologically, she has developed new humanist technoanthropological ways informed by posthumanist feminist theory to study and analyze how the emergence of change takes place as technologies are used in reproduction. By studying the case of the sperm industry, Adrian has shown how ethics is negotiated and regulated in clinics and sperm banks. Additionally, Adrian has always been outspoken in the media, contributing with empirically-based reflections in debates on the uses of reproductive technologies.