CeFH Friday Seminar: The biopolitics of assisted conception in Russia; from demographic anxieties to demographic desires
Event
|Published
Presentation by Veronika Siegl
Click here to join Teams-meeting.
________________________________________
Veronika Siegl is a social anthropologist and gender studies scholar. She is interested in questions of ethics, inequality and autonomy in the context of medicine, technology, economy and the body. Her dissertation, titled „Fragile Truths. The Ethical Labour of Doing Trans-/national Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine" (University of Bern, 2018), scrutinized how morals and values are employed to make sense of, judge, legitimise and govern the intimate and affective relations produced in the sphere of commercial surrogacy.
In her postdoc project Veronika explores how the category of “life" is negotiated in the context of prenatal testing and late abortions. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Austria – where late abortions have recently been strongly contested – the project zooms in on medical decision-making against the backdrop of diagnostic uncertainty and the lack of legal guidelines, on imaginations of a „good“ life as well as on the materiality and the handling of “dead life".
Currently, Veronika is a Visiting Researcher at the University of Cologne (Professorship of Organisation, Technology and Gender) as well as Senior Research Fellow at der University of Vienna (Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology).