Paper short abstract:

In cross-border reproductive care, cultural understanding is key to the well-being of both professionals and patients. This article shows how anthropological understanding of diversity and anthropological methods can help with cultural translation throughout the communication and care processes.

Paper long abstract:

Since 2016, Spain is the first country in Europe -and the third in the world- where the largest number of assisted reproductive treatments are undertaken (Marre et al, 2018, Wyns et al, 2020), most of them with egg donation. In 2016, 12,939 treatments (SEF, 2016) were performed for foreign patients in Spain, a number which increased to 18,475 in 2019 (SEF, 2019). Regarding cross-border reproductive travels, cultural differences between reproductive health providers and patients usually require not only linguistic but also cultural translation to allow mutual understanding (Desy and Marre, forthcoming).

This article aims to show how anthropological understanding of diversity as well as anthropological methodologies, help to improve communication between reproductive health providers and patients and their well-being (Gerstein et al 2007; Varenne, 2003) in a private clinic in Barcelona since 2016, through the AFIN-ART Support Service .

The anthropological framework is particularly useful in helping providers and patients to recognise that the individual understanding and values attributed to reproductive issues such as parenthood, genetics, gametes, embryos, children, and parenthood are not universal. They depend on the social and cultural meanings of their society. Moreover, considering the social and cultural meaning of reproduction, the process of "kinning" (Howell, 2005) and the relationship with genetics, biology, society, culture, personal values and lifestyles, as well as being able to question what seems to be indisputable, helps patients and especially women to find alternative narratives to understand, give meaning to, and cope with the contradictions they face in an assisted reproductive process.

Paper short abstract:

Medical anthropologists are well versed in presenting ethnographic ways of working to either anthropological or health audiences and their writing styles. Further transdisciplinary partnerships are less familiar but can challenge us to step out of narrow academic conventions.

Paper long abstract:

Inter- or transdisciplinary research is increasingly valued - from funding calls to university strategies. Yet transgressing siloed disciplinary standards and structures invokes many challenges familiar to medical anthropologists. Our own project aimed to assemble transdisciplinary data of Caribbean foodscapes in partnership between health researchers, historians and anthropologists. While as medical anthropologists we are well versed in translating our ethnographic ways of working into the language of health sciences’ research protocols or methods reporting, working with historians and their more implicit ways of undertaking research required a new set of translational efforts and sensibilities in all directions. Although transdisciplinary knowledge-making can be an iterative and fluid process of co-learning -- for us this meant working with media archives of advertisement, historical accounts of sugar economies, current and past health data and conducting interviews and collating oral food histories -- the act of writing up these insights resurrected challenges and boundaries. Trying to negotiate how our transdisciplinary knowledge could be returned to disciplinary methodological boundaries of journals, challenged us to consider what is gained or lost by adhering to such reporting standards and telling our joint stories within narrow academic constraints. The common solution found by those of us working across disciplinary boundaries tends to be to write for different audiences in separate publications, but by doing so, we fragment and restrict our insights and assume that audiences would not want to engage with one another. More creative solutions and venues are needed to continue dialogue across disciplinary boundaries.

Paper short abstract:

Through description of processes at stake to make blood in blood products in Belgium, I’ll explain why certain details of it are rarely disclosed and how it could be interesting, conversely, to diffusate biomedical, social and industrial knowledge involved in the making of blood products.

Paper long abstract:

Blood donation is still necessary to the care of many patients today. Whether in emergency or as part of more or less chronic treatment, blood and its derivatives are used to heal. Between blood donated and blood distributed to hospitals or pharmaceutical companies, many stages are crossed and the blood gradually changes state and status. I propose to explore how blood, subject of multiple symbolic representations, is gradually becoming a disembodied biomedical resource and why certain details are rarely disclosed to public, such as the destruction of donations or particular uses of plasma. The knowledge that circulates or not between the different links in the transfusion chain would be essential to make voluntary blood collection works and some details are retained by the institution for quality and quantity purposes.

My intervention will be based on my ethnographic work within the Blood Service of the Belgian Red Cross, with the presentation of some questions I deal with during my current thesis work, as I follow the path of blood between donors and recipients (collection, transport, analyzes, blood processing and delivery). I would like to discuss the possibility that more informations and transparency about the elaboration of blood products, could bring positive effects for the quality of pharmaceuticals made from blood. The shape and content of this information device has yet to be imagined, and anthropological work could be a reflexion support for the institution in charge to collect and transform blood.

Paper short abstract:

This paper argues for a rethinking of anthropological practice to incorporate an inclusive “voice” by exploring how visual media can be used to understand deaf communication and critique dominant methods and modes of representation, including those grounded in presuppositions of the hearing body.

Paper long abstract:

“Voice” as a verbal, or textual, mode of communication is a limiting concept for an inclusive anthropological practice as it fails to account for other ways of being and communicating. Specifically, this definition of “voice” fails to acknowledge the multiple, varied, ways human beings communicate and express themselves beyond spoken language - i.e. through touch, gesture, eye contact or through non-verbal [signed] languages. In this roundtable, I argue for a rethinking of anthropological practice to incorporate an inclusive “voice” that does not speak for, or represent, but is guided by our participants’ preferred modes of communication. Specifically, I explore how visual media can be used to understand deaf ways of communicating and critique dominant methods and modes of representation, including those grounded in presuppositions of the hearing body to the exclusion of other ways of being.

Through a co-creative methodology shaped by the visual, embodied, and performative features of deaf communication, my research uses visual media and play to investigate deaf children’s knowledges in practice and in relation to their own worldmaking. This process facilitates and reveals new ways of knowing, thinking, and communicating, including the development of a deaf-centred film grammar, which not only has applications for the innovation of deaf-centred curriculum activities but more generally in terms of the inherent possibilities of anthropological practice to acknowledge, rather than elide, other ways of being and “voicing”.