Reproducing China: Childbirth, One Child, and Beyond

Description

Conveners

Dr Leon Antonio Rocha (Emmanuel College, Cambridge and Freie Universität Berlin)
Dr Lily Chang (History/Magdalene College, University of Cambridge)
Dr Howard Chiang (Princeton University and Academia Sinica, Taiwan)
Professor Volker Scheid (University of Westminster)

 

 

Conference summary

 

 

This conference brings together established scholars and junior researchers in East Asian history, history of medicine, sociology, political science, anthropology and gender studies, to present their cutting-edge work on the multiple facets of reproductive science, medicine, and technology in modern China.

 

Our conference responds to the blossoming of scholarship in recent years on women, sex and reproduction in late-Imperial and modern China. While many studies tell us a great deal about China, we need more research that confront directly how scientific theories and medical expertise move across cultures, between China and different parts of the world. Taking up the continual critical interest in appropriations and disseminations, we investigate the movement and circulation of expertise, personnel, and material culture related to sexuality, reproduction, fertility, childbirth and population around the world. We want to understand how European and American scientific discourses interacted with Chinese discourses, and how so-called “indigenous” ideas concerning sex and reproduction became defined, incorporated or excluded. We analyse some of the long-range networks of historical and contemporary actors engaged in projects of translation and popularisation. In sum, we wish to build upon and go beyond current debates on “knowledge in transit” in the history of science and medicine.

 

All of the contributors at our conference will mobilise a comparative and global approach to the question of reproduction in China. We aim to produce not only new scholarship on China, but simultaneously new insights on the mechanisms and dynamics of transmissions of reproductive knowledges around the world. Themes covered include: sexology and history of the body in China; conceptualisations of fertility and Chinese medicine; life and biopolitics; childbirth and reproductive technologies; population policies and demographic studies.

 

Accommodation for delegates

NB. CRASSH is not able to help with the booking of accommodation.

 

Sponsors

The conveners are grateful for the support of a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant, the 'Generation to Reproduction' programme through a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award in the history of medicine to the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Needham Research Institute, Cambridge, Department of East Asian Studies, University of Cambridge and the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, and the University of Westminster.

 

Administrative assistance: Helga Brandt (Conference Programme Manager, CRASSH)