Short Abstract

This panel rethinks reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which polarisation is generated, negotiated, and sometimes undone, revealing how time operates as a technology that orders, stratifies, and politicises reproductive life itself.

Long Abstract

Rather than taking reproduction as a ready-made arena of moral or political division, this panel asks how time itself becomes a medium through which polarisation operates. We propose to think of reproductive temporalities not simply as schedules or experiences, but as energies, rhythms, and orientations that shape how reproductive life is lived, contested, and made sense of.

Seen in this way, polarisation is not merely about opposed positions but about dynamics that move or restrict, synchronise or desynchronise people, institutions, technologies and discourses and may be approached in terms of gender asymmetries, age perceptions, and temporal technologies—such as waiting lists, ultrasound measurements, diagnostic timelines, gestational limits, and bureaucratic delays— which produce asymmetries that shape who can act, make decisions, or hope within reproductive fields. Through the lens of time, we can trace how the entanglements of medicine, law, and politics generate asynchronous relations that sustain tension and disagreement, yet also make connection and recognition possible. This panel rethinks reproductive temporalities as dynamic forces through which polarisation is generated, negotiated, and sometimes undone, unravelled in the lived temporalities of clinical description, care, waiting, and decision, revealing how time itself becomes a field of political and affective tension.

We invite ethnographic contributions that explore how polarising dynamics unfold through temporal arrangements of waiting, urgency, delay, standardisation and duration in reproductive practices and debates. What forms of temporal coordination or disjunction do these create? How do they produce, or perhaps loosen, the configurations through which power and value take temporal form?

By approaching polarisation as a temporal technology, we also ask what this perspective might reveal about the potential of anthropology today: how ethnography, attuned to time, relation, and contradiction, can reimagine understanding itself as an act of engagement in a polarised world.

This Panel has 1 pending paper proposal.
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