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MPhil in Health, Medicine and Society

 

Senior Research Associate
Deputy Director of Reproductive Sociology Research Group

Biography

My main research interests are the ethical dilemmas and questions provoked by reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies and the interconnections between concerns about the environment and reproduction. I am particularly concerned with the ways in which ideas of nature and naturalness are implicated in morality and ethics, as well as the importance of gender, class, race and sexuality in structuring parenting and reproduction. 

As a research associate in ReproSoc, I have worked on a research project on representations of IVF in the British media, focusing particularly on newspapers and TV documentaries covering the birth of the first 'test-tube baby', Louise Brown. I have also been developing the Reproducing the Environment collaborative project with Janelle Lamoreaux and carried out pilot ethnographic fieldwork investigating seed saving amongst gardeners in southern England.

My book, Making a Good Life, was published in 2016 by Princeton University Press. It looks at middle class British people's ideas about the ethics of reproduction and assisted reproductive technologies. In the book, I trace the connections between how people think about the ethics of reproduction and ethics in their everyday lives, in a context of anxieties about environmental crisis and destruction of the natural world, intense public scrutiny of parenting and reproduction and the rise of biotechnology. 

I am the work package coordinator for the (In)Fertile Environments strand of the Wellcome Trust-funded Changing (In)Fertilities Project. As part of this project I will develop my research in the area of reproduction and the environment, as well as working with colleagues to assess the state of the field in this area. 

I chair an interdisciplinary reading group on reproduction, based in London. Please get in touch with me if you would be interested in joining. I am also the editor of the What's Out There reviews strand in Reproductive BioMedicine and Society Online.

Dr Katie Dow on the Sociology Department website

Katie Dow

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