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Short abstract:

Participatory workshop where participants will be divided into small groups to work on the tasks collaboratively.

Abstract:

From tracking apps and wearables, to ‘smart’ condoms, hormonal profiling and implantable microchips, digital contraceptive technologies offer a potential ‘solution’ to unintended pregnancy, limited pharmaceutical innovation, and enduring user dissatisfaction of modern pharmaceutical contraceptives. Femtech companies leading this development appear to be user-led and pride their technologies for meeting various user-defined contraceptive priorities, such as non-hormonal, non-invasive, and user-controlled. While a promising glimpse of hope for a landscape long overdue for change, the transformation of pregnancy prevention from a pharmaceutical drug to a direct-to-consumer digital technology brings about novel risks regarding efficacy, safety, security, and accountability. Indeed, the very ‘novelty’ of these technologies and their ‘transformative’ potential is debatable given the homogeneity of Femtech companies, the similarity of tracking apps to fertility-awareness methods, and their position within a broader landscape of retrogressing reproductive rights.This workshop invites participants to collaboratively explore contraceptive development trajectories. Adapted from a creative qualitative workshop, it is structured around three tasks: (1) prompts participants to think about the past and present by mapping contraceptive methods along a self-defined timeline; (2) introduces various ‘novel’ digital contraceptives for discussion and mapping; and (3) invites participants to speculatively imagine ‘what’s otherwise’ for contraception. While framed around transformation, innovation, and timelines, this workshop ‘troubles time’ by engaging with non-linear trajectories of change that draw attention to the continual co-production of past, present, and future timescapes. Inviting diverse perspectives to reconfigure the future of contraception aims to challenge a solutionist agenda and the normative values ascribed to ‘old’ and ‘new’.