Spring Seminar Series: Amrita Pande

"Global fertility Industry and the Transnational Reproduction of Whiteness"Amrita Pande is Professor and Head of Department of Sociology at University of Cape Town, South Africa. Her research lies at the intersection of gender, globalization and the intimate, with a focus on transnational reproduction, repro-genetic technologies, and multimodal ethnography. Her work has appeared in many journals including Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Gender and Society, Journal of Gender Studies, Medical Anthropology, Critical Social Policy, International Migration Review, Qualitative Sociology, Feminist Studies, Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Anthropologica, PhiloSOPHIA, Reproductive BioMedicine and in numerous edited volumes. Her most recent books include Epistemic Justice and the Postcolonial University (With Chaturvedi and Daya, Wits and NYU Press, 2023), Birth Controlled: Selective Reproduction and Neo Eugenics in India and South Africa (Manchester Univ Press, 2022), and Scripting defiance: Four Sociological Vignettes (With Ari Sitas, Sumangala Damodaran, Wiebke Keim, and Nicos Trimikliniotis, Tulika Books and Columbia University Press, 2022). Her award-winning book Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India (Columbia University Press 2014) has recently been released in India (Primus Press). Over the past two decades she has conducted multi-sited research on fertility clinics, traveling egg provision and cross-border surrogacy in India, Cambodia, Ghana and South Africa. She has written for national newspapers across the world and has appeared in Laurie Taylor's Thinking Allowed on the BBC, Sarah Carey’s Newstalk on Irish radio, DR2 Deadline on Danish National television, TRT world, Turkey, and on SABC2 and SAfM, South Africa to discuss her work on the fertility industry. She is also an educatorperformer touring the world with a performance lecture series, Made in India: Notes from a Baby farm (co-produced by Riksteatern, Sweden and Global Studies Production, Denmark) based on her ethnographic work on surrogacy. Made in India premiered at Södra Teatern, Sweden and has toured over 20 cities since 2012. In 2022 Amrita started the Women Walk at Midnight (WWaM) movement in South Africa, to normalize the presence of women in public spaces at night, and to insert “pleasure” into the act of walking in one of the most violent countries in the world. As the founder of the WWaM movement in South Africa, she addressed the 23rd International Walk21 Conference, in Kigali, Rwanda in 2023.

When 12:00 pm to 1:15 pm on Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Location SOC 241, 96 Cummington Mall