Research

Projects

April 2021 - present

Emerging markets in assisted reproductive technologies in Southern Africa

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the School of Public Health, University of Witwatersrand (South Africa)
Through funding from the Australian Research Council, we explore the various migrations, or what is called reproductive travel, in and through South Africa. Reproductive travel refers to the mobilities of patients, medical providers, egg donors, and reproductive tissues across borders.

February 2020-February 2021

Impressionable Bodies: Epigenetic models of plasticity in the Global South

Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalization, Deakin University (Australia)
This project aims to investigate how epigenetics, the science of how environmental factors switch genes on or off, is reshaping notions of the body, heredity and biological plasticity in the global South.

February 2014-March 2020

"Beyond the Petri Dish: Potentiality in Assisted Conception in South Africa

Doctoral Research in Social Anthropology at the University of Cape Town
From 14 months of multi-sited ethnographic research in fertility clinics and egg donor agencies in urban South Africa, I draw out the political, affective and temporal registers of potentiality as they materialise in concrete instances of reproductive medicine that is entangled within a context of capitalist biomedicine. Here, I argue that while biomedical knowledge systems frame certain objects, times, and futures as having potential, it simultaneously negates and neglects other kinds of futures,

January 2021-present

Financialization of fertility care

In contexts without well-resourced public funding for assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs), socio-economic status continues to structure access to fertility care. Yet, the question of how couples and solo patients afford ARTs is starkly under-researched. We explore the emergence of new financial infrastructures to fund fertility treatments.