SNSF-project at the University of Zurich, Switzerland 

 

Project Duration: 2010-2013
Head of the project: Willemijn de Jong
Project members: Nolwenn Bühler, Eveline Y. Nay, Kathrin Zehnder 

Abstract
The research project investigates the cultural meanings of fertility, reproduction and normative and non-normative family life, and explores how ‘fertility’ and ‘family’ are locally created by the uses of reproductive technologies and kinship ideas and practices of different individual and institutional actors. We particularly explore the interrelationships of the local, national and transnational dimensions of making kinship and the social (de)stabilisation by assisted technologies of reproduction. The goal of the project is to achieve detailed insight into the processual efforts to have children and to build and continue ones ‘own family’ in Switzerland at the beginning of the 21. century through assisted technologies of reproduction. Theoretically, the project is based on noted ethnographic orientated research on this topic in new kinship studies, gender and queer studes, and science and technology studies. The main research questions are: How do processes of having children and of ‘making kinship’ with transnationalised reproductive technologies lead to the kinship configurations of the heterosexual family, the lesbian, gay and transgender family, and the intergenerational extended family, as they are perceived and lived today.

 

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