Paper short abstract:

This paper investigates framing as a device in public debates on assisted reproductive technologies. It highlights the performativity of framings by showing how framings enact a desired reality through gradually (re)ordering a sociotechnical arrangement.

Paper long abstract:

STS scholars have shown that framing is a key aspect of governing emerging technologies. Control over the framework in which a technology is debated defines legitimate issues and actors of a debate and is thus a significant form of political power. But framings also define technologies themselves. Michel Callon (2007) has used the concept of framing to illustrate that frames are always matters of exclusions, as to frame means to create certain links and attachments while disabling others. Framings thus enact technologies as particular sociotechnical arrangements. Important questions then concern not only how framings come about but also what they do or enable. To investigate these questions as closely intertwined, this paper conceptualizes practices of framing as performative devices; that is as attempts to create a desired reality through a gradual (re)ordering of a sociotechnical arrangement. To make the work visible that goes into establishing a new framing as well as highlight what these framings do, the paper presents an analysis of how an established framing, that of assisted reproductive technologies being ethically problematic, has been contested and gradually redefined and by that led to a new sociotechnical arrangement. Drawing on empirical material gathered in a PhD project conducted under supervision of Ulrike Felt at the University of Vienna, I investigate public debates around assisted reproductive technologies that led to a policy change in Austria. I describe how this change was accompanied by a reframing of these technologies as (possible) matters of discrimination.