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Short abstract:

Presenting early findings from the field, this paper explores how scientists working on the Artificial Placenta Technology socio-materially enact ‘biology’, ‘intimacy’, and ‘familial bonding’, in their everyday work.

Long abstract:

The Artificial Amniotic Sac and Placenta Technology (AAPT) – also known as the Artificial Womb (AWT) or the Artificial Placenta Technology (APT) – is currently under pre-clinical research and development in laboratories across the world. This technology seeks to improve the conditions of perinatal and neonatal care; aiming to increase the chances of survival for premature babies born before 28 weeks of gestation, through an enforced continuation of the physiological foetal state. In so doing, this technology promises to challenge not only how foetuses and neonates are socio-materially enacted, possibly blurring the boundaries between the two, but it also raises questions around the enactments of birth, kinship, personhood, etc.

Drawing upon recent ethnographic research with scientists working on the development of the Artificial Placenta Technology in the Netherlands, I will present early findings on how actors within the field socio-materially enact ‘biology’, ‘intimacy’, and ‘familial bonding’, in conjunction with the technology in question. I will seek to bring forth how the ‘making’ of the Artificial Placenta Technology allows for a simultaneous remaking, transformation, or maintenance of the ways in which biology, artificiality, reproduction, as well as kinship are performed. Given my focus, within recent fieldwork, on the research environments where this technology is being developed, I will also highlight how intimacy, care, and collegial bonding is enacted within and outside laboratories, in meeting rooms, and in other work settings. In so doing, I will reflect upon how such practices are rendered ‘visible’ within these particular spaces.