Paper short abstract:

Using narratives of egg providers, I consider the entanglement of aspirations, reproductive labour, and urban form in Johannesburg. This paper explores how egg provision knits ideas about the future good life with the topography of the city, history, and mobility.

Paper long abstract:

Anonymized egg providers, who supply reproductive tissue for another’s use in in vitro fertilization, are a key resource in the global market for reproductive services. Africa is a growing global market for reproductive technology, with key fertility hubs in Nairobi, Cairo, Lagos, Cape Town and Johannesburg. Recent research in egg provision has highlighted how political, historical and economic contexts shape and structure egg providers’ encounters with the global market in reproductive tissues and services. Global forces such as increasing neoliberal economic policies, longstanding legacies of colonialism, and national legislation, history and ethics have been reflected in the intimate engagements with egg provision. In this paper, I unpack egg provider narratives to consider the entanglements of aspirations with urban form, namely Johannesburg. Here, I follow three uses of aspirations. In the first, aspirations as the technical reproductive labour involved in retrieving eggs, a technique also described as an “egg aspiration”. In the second, aspiration as what Appadurai describes as a navigational capacity, which connects one’s situatedness with a topography and horizon. And third, as a hoped for, perhaps different and imaged future; that is, what egg providers hope their reproductive labours will make possible. This paper in sum explores how egg provision knots together ideas about the good life, or the better life, with the topography of the city, environments, history, and mobilities.

Paper short abstract:

Thousands of Ugandan women temporarily migrate to the Middle East in search of jobs in order to support themselves and their families. Several opt out of marriage or postpone it. Children are the major reason for this choice. Young mothers are pacing marriage towards their most desired futures.

Paper long abstract:

“Motherhood is not the problem, marriage is!” I will delve into experiences of young Ugandan women who opt to temporarily migrate to the Middle East in search of jobs in order to support their families, particularly, their children. In the last decade, young people have been migrating to the Middle East in search of jobs and better futures. Social media and other channels are filled with horror stories about racism, physical and sexual violence, mistreatment and abuse faced by Ugandan labour migrants. Amidst all this, however, more and more young women mobilise everything they have in order to get on that flight towards a hoped-for future. I have encountered several women who opt out of marriage or are running away from bad marriages. But there are also women who wish to postpone or rather, pace marriage by focusing on themselves, “stabilizing”, “settling” or “working” on themselves before they can commit to a marriage or stable partnership. For those who already have children, their major reason for choosing to work as maids in the middle East, is so they can support their children whose fathers have abandoned them; motherhood is not the problem. This paper presents an ethnographic study of young Ugandan women who choose self-love and motherhood while pacing marriage towards their most desired futures. These women’s agency pushes them to make choices that will allow them to be recognized, not for their marital status, but for other kinds of individualities including independence, breadwinners, providers, homeowners and mothers.

Paper short abstract:

To understand reproductive futuring in Namibia, the paper analyzes class dynamics and social reproduction together.

Paper long abstract:

Long before the end of apartheid and independence in 1990, class formation emerged in Namibia. Today, strong class inequalities shape the country. While a tiny elite and a small, but growing middle-class live relatively comfortable lives, the vast majority of the population struggles to survive. Remarkably, these dynamics have so far not been discussed in relation to social reproduction. For several decades now, the number of births in Namibia is declining. At the same time, there are strong variations in fertility for different subpopulations. In my paper, I trace these variations and link them to different class configurations. At least three different reproductive class constellations can be distinguished: elite families with many children, middle class families with few children, and single mothers with many children from different partners. I argue, that the three constellations also embed different aspirations for the future, from consolidation (elites), to improvement (middle classes) and survival (single parents). Consequently, to understand reproductive futuring in Namibia, it is important to consider social class and social reproduction together.

Paper short abstract:

We describe the ways in which spiritual beliefs play important roles within high-tech ART in Ghana and South Africa. Based upon interviews with 40 informants in Ghana and 70 informants in South Africa we explore the spiritual interventions among staff and patients that accompany their treatment.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper we describe the ways in which various forms of spiritual beliefs continue to play important roles within high-tech ART in Ghana and South Africa. Based upon fieldwork for two broader projects that included interviews with 40 informants in two clinics in Ghana and interviews with 70 informants and site visits to 7 clinics in South Africa; we explore the spiritual and religious interventions and concerns among staff and patients that accompany their medical interventions. We consider these practices and expressions of religiosity as part of the religious ‘heterotopia’ in which there is a blurring of boundaries between the sacred and ordinary in everyday life and a means through which the imaginaries of a future family are inscribed. They reinforce staff and patients as moral subjects who have done everything possible to assist in the uncertain vagaries of assisted reproduction—another form of care to enable, complement and enhance high tech intervention. In this paper we consider the creation of sacred spaces in the clinics, the positioning of clinicians, embryologists, patients and donors as moral subjects, rituals that form part of IVF practice and the new dilemmas of translation when ARTs travel to different contexts.

Paper short abstract:

The high fertility rate in Eastern Uganda, combined with increasing frailty of partnerships and paternal filiation, means that single mothers are concerned about the future relations of children to their fathers. While children 'belong' to their father and his clan, paternal care is often minimal.

Paper long abstract:

In the patrilineal, virilocal societies of eastern Uganda, the convention is that children ‘belong’ to their fathers. Sons should inherit land from them, and daughters should marry and cultivate their husbands’ land. Continuing high birth rates, land shortage and changes in patterns of partnership have complicated this pattern. The decline of marriage has meant that more women are single mothers. Classic anthropological work on kinship in Africa concerned itself with descent and filiation. Mothers today confront the existential question of what filiation really means in practice. Many would like the fathers of their children to take responsibility, but poverty and changes in gender relations have made this a challenge. Women with children by different men find themselves in a situation Jane Guyer termed ‘polyandrous motherhood’—where a woman has, not concurrent husbands, but concurrent fathers of her children.

These issues are prominent in Butaleja District where I have been conducting fieldwork over five decades. Repeated household surveys in one village show radical falls in bridewealth and in polygyny. Ongoing participant observation and interviews reveal concerns over livelihood and the support of children—and the future relation of children to fathers. The total fertility rate in Uganda as a whole has fallen from 7.4 in 1988 to 5.4 in 2016, led by declines in urban areas. But it has remained high in some rural parts of the country including Butaleja District, a ‘fertility hotspot’, with a reported total fertility rate of 8.0. Family and filiation take on new forms in response.

Paper short abstract:

How can we conceptualise birthing care ethics across a bifurcated South African health care system? This paper examines what we call technologies of care in the experiences of women in Cape Town using both the public and private healthcare sector.

Paper long abstract:

In South Africa, the state provides free maternity care in a primary healthcare framework that functions side-by-side with some of the world’s most expensive private healthcare. Researchers have focused mostly on the public sector where the majority receive community level care from nurses, and less on the care women receive from medical specialists practising in-rooms at state-of-the-art private hospitals. Problematically, this makes the public sector hyper-visible in questions of care, while erasing from view private sector carelessness.

We employ a care ethics to understand the difference that difference(s) make in matters of maternity care. We analyse antenatal classes, c-sections, and socio-material performances of birth as technologies of care that enact difference(s) by situating maternal experiences according to a hierarchy of care. Where care in maternal matters erases the conditions that give rise to such hierarchies, our paper argues for a care ethics that makes explicit the cuts these difference(s) make

We draw on a range of maternity care practices, discourses, structural arrangements, and material relations to notice the way different motherhoods materialise in the caring technologies deployed on behalf of poor or wealthy soon-to-be mothers in Cape Town. Claiming an inheritance from science and technology studies and feminist new materialism, we resist the impulse towards binary thinking, despite our research field being commonly staged as bifurcated. As such we attempt analysis towards birthing futures through an ethico-political response to South African social life that is lived as a messy overlay of entangled parts.

Paper short abstract:

In current Africa, we can see singlization due to different factors. For example, what are the implications of the legalization of polygyny, as represented in Kenya? Based on ethnographic data, I would like to describe how traditional patrilineal African societies have structurally changed.

Paper long abstract:

In recent years, Eastern Africa has seen a marked change in women's sexuality and a trend towards single motherhood, along with a rise in education levels. The effects of this singleness are manifold. First, changes in sexuality have led to a further urban exodus of single women from rural areas, undermining the very foundations of traditional patrilineal social structures in rural areas. This situation also results in a serious problem that destabilises the legitimacy of single women's children. Second, informal polygyny is observed in urban areas. This is a backlash situation regarding the institution of marriage and attitudes, where polygyny is legislated in the name of protecting the second wife and below, with a predominant male. In other words, the social negotiation of reproduction is taking place in the face of the structural singleness of women and the backlash against legal patriarchy. The increase in 'matrifocal' families with single women at the centre is noted as an aspect of change in patrilineal African societies.

First, this paper examines how notions of sexuality are changing in the context of increasing education inequalities in traditional and modern social environments. Then it highlights how the representations of city elite women and poor rural women are forming 'cohabiting families' based on mutually complementary relationships. At the end, I expect to discuss with audience on what direction African societies will take given the current condition of high early pregnancy and singleness rates.

Paper short abstract:

We reflect on the process of working on a research project that seeks to reimagine reproduction in Africa. We examine the process through which we articulate the research agenda and focus on the process of networking and building a cohort of support.

Paper long abstract:

We reflect on the process of working on a project that seeks to reimagine reproduction in Africa. Our project aims to develop a cohort of emerging African scholars based in and working on reframing the reproductive agenda on the continent. In doing so, we shift the focus of reproduction away from the western gaze and the preoccupation with biomedical concerns and birth control by thinking collectively with emerging scholars in reimagining reproductive futures in Africa. We argue that this process of researching reproduction and reimagining futures is part of decolonising and transforming knowledge production, critical in higher education institutions, which have far too long been dominated by Western and colonial paradigms. However, as we show, this process is not easy. The paper focuses on two parts of the project through which we dismantle the hierarchically ordered conceptions of knowledge.

First, we examine the process through which we articulated the research agenda as produced through, based in, and driven by African reproductive perspectives challenging the naturalisation of reproduction and its racialised assumptions while highlighting caring and creative collectivity in this process. Second, we focus on networking and building a cohort of support in advancing this research agenda through articulating the specific practices that troubled, enabled, and decolonised knowledge production. A decolonial perspective, as we conclude, has utility in questioning and shifting knowledge production as it relates to the naturalisation of reproduction but also highlights the ongoing challenge in reorienting research futures that require a constant questioning of our practices.

Paper short abstract:

This paper focuses on how development projects, raising awareness on the use of contraception, are perceived locally by the subjects involved. Through ethnography research, I analyze how these projects influence and are influenced by local gender and generation patterns in southern Benin.

Paper long abstract:

In many contexts in Africa, and especially in Benin where I carried out ethnographic research, there are numerous projects aimed at promoting women's 'development' and 'emancipation', through the promotion of reproductive, maternal and child health services, and through awareness-raising on the use of contraceptive methods. The aim of this paper is to investigate how these projects are perceived locally and what are the polyvocal and polysemous points of view of the people involved. Emphasis will be placed on individual subjectivities’ strategies and on their agency, even in cases where the latter is subtle and does not necessarily result in practices of rejection or resistance. Local beliefs emphasize the importance of reproduction, descendance and existential continuity with the ancestors. These beliefs play a role in the construction of gender identities. In these scenario it might seem contradictory that the same women who claim to want as many children as possible also show interest in modern contraceptive methods. However, contraception is actually sometimes considered by subjectivities as an integral part of their reproductive trajectories. This local interpretation is also reflected at the level of development programs, where the term ‘family planning’ is used in place of ‘contraception’. Indeed, even though many projects on reproduction are written with a top-down approach, it is interesting to observe that the local operators’ cultural background can make a difference with respect to the original goals set up for a project, ultimately affecting its implementation on the field.