Contracting Care in Indian Transnational Surrogacy

Parnassus Campus Room N-225

The Sociology Speaker Series will be hosting Kalindi Vora, PhD (University of California, San Diego) on Monday, Oct 24. Location and a brief description of the talk are below.

The public lecture will be held at 5:30pm at Parnassus, Room N-225, followed by a reception. Vora's talk will bring together ethnographic material with analysis of historical and contemporary medical discourses and practices that materialize difference and uneven power in the Assisted Reproductive Technology clinic. It starts by asking, how can we understand the growth of surrogacy as a transnational medical service sector in India, given the nation's long history with medicine as a tool of imperialism and later neoliberal market expansion? After critically examining technological, legal and medical norms, this talk suggests ways to consider the ethical stakes of commercial surrogacy from the location of women acting as surrogates.

The student seminar will be held at 3:30pm on the 24th. We will be reading two of Kalindi's articles - one focused on her empirical, ethnographic work and another that discusses the ethics of her research practice. *Please RSVP to me if you are interested in attending the student seminar by tomorrow, Oct 5.*