Spring 2024 Events Programme
CORTH Conversations: "The psychosocial experiences of donor conceived young adults"
Date: 25th November, 12noon to 2pm GMT
Location: GSRC (Arts C) and over Zoom (please email corth@sussex.ac.uk for details)
CORTH is joined by Sophie Zadeh, who will be presenting a talk on "The psychosocial experiences of donor conceived young adults."
Sophie joined the School of Psychology at Sussex in March 2024 as a Reader in Family Psychology. Her research focuses on experiences of parents and children (including adult children) in non-normative family forms, including families formed through sperm donation, egg donation, and surrogacy. She has also studied parents' and children's perspectives and experiences in families in which there are two mums or two dads, and families headed by transgender parents.
Research in Progress Forum
Date: 29th October, 2pm to 4pm GMT
Location: C333 (Arts C)
The Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies, and Health (CORTH) at the School of Global Studies is pleased to invite doctoral students and PGRs to present their work as part of our Autumn Term's Researchers’ Forum, to be held on 29 October 2024. This is an opportunity to present work at any stage to a friendly audience made up of Centre students and faculty.
Your presentation should reflect on an aspect of gender, sexuality, sexual/reproductive health, feminist theory, kinship, broadly. We welcome scholars from a wide range of disciplinary locations to share their work with us. You don’t need to be an existing member of the Centre to present (although please join us if you haven’t already!)
Presentations should be 15 minutes in total, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A.
How to apply?
Please send titles and short abstracts (100 words) to corth@sussex.ac.uk with the subject line as CORTH Research forum 2024. The deadline is 7th October, 2024. If you have any questions about the forum, please email corth@sussex.ac.uk
HIV, gender and the politics of medicine: Embodied democracy in the global south
Book Launch, featuring the author and CORTH co-Director Dr. Beth Mills
Date: 16th October, 4.30pm - 6pm
Location: Convening Space, 1st floor of the IDS building
Join us for this event with Elizabeth Mills, author of the new book HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine and former IDS PhD Student and Research Fellow. Dr Mills will be speaking with a panel of academics and activists from South Africa and the UK, to discuss the lessons from the global struggle for equitable access to life-saving HIV treatment. This will include the value of art, resistance and transnational activism when holding global and national institutions accountable to the embodied wellbeing of citizens. Each of the speakers have, for decades, been concerned with understanding the embodied ramifications of health inequalities around the world. After providing an overview of HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine, we will hear from the panelists as they reflect on the book and on their own trajectory of work in academia, art and activism around gender, health and democracy.
About the book
HIV, Gender and the Politics of Medicine centers on the lives of women who live with HIV in South Africa and who have navigated a complex assemblage of affective relationships, activist networks, government institutions and global coalitions to transform international and national health policies that govern access to essential HIV medicines. Drawing on 20 years of multi-sited ethnographic and policy research in South Africa, India and Brazil, the book foregrounds the value of understanding the embodied and political dimensions of health policy and reveals the networked threads that weave women’s embodied precarity into the governance of technologies and the technologies of governance. This study of women’s activism to access HIV medicine is not simply a study of the evolution of global and national health policy but one that reveals the extent to which policy becomes embodied, recognizing that bodies too are never the same and experience intersecting inequalities in profoundly unique ways. By focusing specifically on policies around access to HIV medicines at a national, transnational and global level, this book traces an important history - the struggle to access these medicines in the Global South – and brings this history into the present by articulating the lessons learnt by the activists and policy makers engaged in shaping these vital policies over the first two decades of the 21st century.
Speakers
- Elizabeth Mills, Senior Lecturer, Anthropology, Sussex University; CORTH Co-Director
- Hayley MacGregor, Professorial Research Fellow, IDS; CORTH Co-Director
- Nondumiso Hlwele, Artist, activist and member of the Bambanani Women’s Group, South Africa
- Maya Unnithan, Head of Anthropology, Sussex University; CORTH Director
- Lenore Manderson, Distinguished Professor of Public Health and Medical Anthropology, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
For further details about the event, and information on registering to attend, please visit IDS' website at HIV, gender and the politics of medicine: Embodied democracy in the global south - Institute of Development Studies (ids.ac.uk)
Surrogacy Workshop: "Surrogacy Beyond the Carceral: Culture, Law and Lived Experience"
Date: 27-28th June, 10am - 4pm
Location: Freeman Centre G22 on 27th June and Global Studies Resource Centre (GSRC, Arts C) on the 28th June
On the 27th and 28th June, the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technology and Health (CORTH) and the Department of Liberal Arts, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad, are holding a workshop on Surrogacy Beyond the Carceral: Culture, Law and Lived Experience.
Globally, state-legal interventions in surrogacy remain deeply fraught. Research on the legal aspects of surrogacy has been fixated on its prohibition / regulation. In countries that have banned surrogacy, selective ideas of motherhood have been invoked which are especially challenged by the practice of gestational commercial surrogacy. At the same time, States that have chosen to ban commercial surrogacy in favour of altruistic surrogacy have also valorised selective ideas of women’s reproductive labour through recourse to the moral language of kinship, family and gift giving. Yet we know little about the moralistic valuation of states that have regulated/legalized surrogacy in entirety, – and why legalizing the practice has been considered more suitable than banning it. The workshop will bring together scholars from a wide range of regional and political contexts with contributions from Russia, South Korea, US, Germany, India, and Ireland.
The workshop is hybrid and will take place on the University of Sussex’s campus in Falmer (in the Freeman Centre on the 27th and then in GSRC on the 28th) and over Zoom. If you would like to attend, please register at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/global-studies-school-university-of-sussex/t-jzlymkv or use the QR code in the poster. Registration for the workshop is free. Please note the ticket shop will close on the 18th June so be sure to book your place before then.
"Queering Global Health" Symposium
Date: 4th June, 9am BST onward
Location: C333 (Arts C)
On the 4th June, the Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies, and Health (CORTH) is holding a symposium on Queering Global Health.
We envision the space as one where we can bring creativity forward, and where we can – through the structure and the content of the workshop – challenge normative and restrictive ways of working, thinking, and doing. Not only are we aiming to explore what might be entailed in ‘queering global health’ but more broadly we’re interested in what ‘queering academic orthodoxies’ might look like, as we do this. Our hope is that through this workshop we can, together, engender a process where ‘queering global health knowledge’ refigures and challenges established roles and practices and opens up new possibilities and futures.
Colleagues from around the globe will speak on topics such as What does/would it mean to queer wellbeing and global health? What can regional perspectives reveal about queer and transgender modes of care and community in the face of challenges to health and wellbeing? and What creative tools and approaches can we use to disrupt harmful paradigms and open up new queer futures?
If you are interested in attending the symposium, please register for free at https://www.ticketsource.co.uk/global-studies-school-university-of-sussex/t-nogxpga. The symposium will take place in Arts C, C333
Research in Progress Forum
Date: 23rd May, 1pm BST onward
Location: A155 (Arts A) or over Zoom -
https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/3885139671?pwd=ajUyeEpRYmkrNDhGRk12OWtvenM0Zz09&omn=98363021867
Meeting ID: 388 513 9671 Passcode: 887084
The Centre for Cultures of Reproduction, Technologies, and Health (CORTH) at the School of Global Studies is pleased to invite doctoral students and PGRs to present their work as part of our Spring Term Researchers’ Forum, to be held on 23 May 2024. This is an opportunity to present work at any stage to a friendly audience made up of Centre students and faculty.
Presenters should be a current University of Sussex doctoral student and presentations should reflect on an aspect of reproduction - reproductive health, reproductive labour, reproductive technologies, legislation and law, sexuality, kinship, to name a few - which engages with scholarship on gender, sexuality, and/or feminist studies. Students don’t need to be an existing member of the Centre (although please join us if you haven’t already!). Presentations should be 15 minutes in total, followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. Refreshments provided.
For those who want to present but might not be selected for the current forum, we will host another research forum in October 2024.
On the 25th January, CORTH’s Maria Moscati joins Juliana Cesario Alvim Gomes, CEU LEGS, in Vienna for an open conversation on ‘Reproductive Rights and Strategic Litigation’. This hybrid event takes place 12 noon to 2pm GMT. The Zoom details are below, or use the QR code on the poster.
Abstract: The conversation between Maria Moscati (CORTH/Sussex) and Juliana Cesario Alvim Gomes (LEGS/CEU) will explore legal mobilizations and judicial approaches to reproductive rights in Italy and Brazil, delving into differences, similarities, challenges, and strategies
Zoom Link: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/7337555540?pwd=dXN5TTQvNzhwaWkzbFJmS1piSTdUQT09
ID: 733 755 5540
Password: 504096
CORTH's Autumn Event Programme
The Period Experience for Every Body
24 November 2023, 12:30 until 13:30, Meeting House
Following their popular session for International Women's Day earlier this year, BSMS and LifeScience colleagues have organised another discussion event on the topic of menstrual health with Dr. Chi Eziefula, Senior Lecturer at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS) and co-Director of CORTH, and guest speaker Jane Dancey, Somatic Health Practitioner and Educator.
The Period Experience for Every Body : Staff Hub : University of Sussex
CORTH Conversations: 'Precarity of Hope, Uncertainty and Risk: unsettling expert and experiential knowledge of novel treatments for genetic disorders'
11 December 2023, 1 - 2.30pm GMT
This is a Hybrid event. Attendees can come in-person to Bramber Hourse room 235 or join online at https://universityofsussex.zoom.us/j/3885139671?pwd=ajUyeEpRYmkrNDhGRk12OWtvenM0Zz09 (Passcode 887084)
Dr. Chattoo's seminar is based on her paper that looks at the use of ‘novel’ therapies, a combination of thalidomide and hydroxyurea, in treating a potentially life- threatening genetic disorder (thalassemia). Rather than assume that medical knowledge constitutes (of) immutable stable diagnostic/ clinical categories or terms, a lack of consensus within medical/ scientific fraternity on the use of treatment regimens brings home the significance of local practices through which ‘evidence’ is framed to legitimise ‘improvisation’. In focusing on the social milieu within which the materiality of the disease is located, the notions of risk and evidence are foregrounded as processual and shifting in time. Drawing on ethnographic data on how parents of children with thalassemia in parts of rural India negotiate prognostic uncertainty and precarity of caring, knowledge and ignorance production appear as ‘intricately entangled’. The paper concludes with an ethnographer’s dilemma about how to write about what might seem, from the outside, ethically contentious though innovative practices, serving the economic interests of the clinicians and pharmaceutical firms. Yet, from inside, the narratives of parents and patients struggling to access basic care in the state system, persuade us to understand their quest for novel treatments (hope), ilaj (both treatment and cure), as part of a wider pragmatic ethic of care.
Dr. Sangeeta Chattoo is a Senior Research Fellow, in the department of Sociology, at the University of York. She started her ethnographic journey, dating back to her doctoral research on the borderland between medicine and culture in Kashmir (India) in 1985. After completing my doctorate from the University of Delhi in 1990, she taught at the University of Western Australia for two years, took a career- break for five years before joining the University of Leeds and finally migrating to York in 2006. Her research and scholarship have meandered around intersecting lines of medical knowledge and practice; inequalities and health, race, ethnicity, citizenship and governance; chronic illness, gender and caring. Sangeeta has worked extensively on health and citizenship issues of minoritised ethnic communities in the UK. For the past decade, however, she has been fascinated by the history, ontology and governance of sickle cell and thalassemia within a global context and the local engagements with emerging forms of medical practice and claims to citizenship and state. Sangeeta is on the editorial board of the medical sociology section of Frontiers and is currently co-editing a special issue (with Veena Das, Conceptualising technology in reframing the boundaries between the normal and the pathological; and a forthcoming, Handbook on Racism, Ethnicity and Health (with Hannah Bradby, Edward Elgar Press). Two of her recent articles are in Anthropology and Medicine and policy and Politics (profile at https://www.york.ac.uk/sociology/our-staff/academic/sangeeta-chattoo/)
CORTH Conversations: 'Empowering communities through University partnerships in public health: a pilot project in Nepal and the Philippines'
Anna is a Research Professor in the Global Studies School at Sussex. Laura is the project’s Research Assistant, a Lecturer in Global Public Health and a Researcher in decolonising health education at Sussex. Kamal is a Lecturer at the Research Center for Educational Innovation & Development (CERID) Tribhuvan University, Nepal and Teresa is a Professor with the University of Santo Tomas, the Philippines. Both Kamal and Teresa will be participating online.
Read all about the project and talk at -
'Parental Mental Health Network Conference' - An inaugural two-day Conference, bringing together academics, policy makers, clinicians, charities and people with lived experience. See the pdf. for full details of the Coference - Parental Mental Health Conference Itinerary [PDF 547.52KB]
CORTH Conversations: 'Human Rights in the Global Menstrual Movement'
View our past events here.