Conversations sur la santé reproductive

Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future


Call for Papers




Place: Online Conference

Dates: Week of February 1-7, 2021.

Languages: English and Spanish.

Scholars from across disciplines at the Johns Hopkins University and School of Medicine are organizing a conference entitled “Critical Conversations on Reproductive Health/Care: Past, Present, and Future,” to take place during the first week of February 2021.

This conference will bring together historians, anthropologists, pregnancy caregivers, artists, activists, and journalists to address key issues in the history of reproduction and the practice of reproductive medicine. We are particularly interested in how reproductions intersect with phenomenon such as, but not limited to: midwifery, parenting, and kinship-making; trauma in obstetric and abortion care; obstetric racism in the past and present; colonialism, migration, and displacement; and incarceration and detention.

The virtual meeting will consist of a series of conversations spread over multiple days, and with multiple forms of interaction. It will feature “reverse keynotes,” or discussions of key new books by leading scholars, as well as panel discussions about pre-circulated papers. In addition, there will be a documentary film screening and discussion, as well as community-centered discussions with maternal healthcare activists and artist Rebecca Mwase.

Recognizing that “reproduction” is a loaded term, in part, due to its capitalistic productive connotation, we intend to clarify the complexities of the term by interrogating reproduction as a site of intense struggle for healthcare access and justice; as the site of pressing issues regarding incarceration and decarceration; and as a site of the production and reification of settler-colonial and neo-colonial narratives about race, nation, and autonomy.

We further recognize that activists of color have redefined modern-liberal, white-centered, and individualistic notions of reproductive choice, and that they have done so by promoting the intersectional teachings of reproductive justice. Inspired by this tradition—and recognizing our limits in engaging with it and drawing on its analytics in our own work—we aim to recognize and learn from historic legacies while envisioning reproductive futures based on dignity, solidarity, and historically-informed collective action.

We also aim to engage with the intimate aspects of reproductive care/taking, especially by unpacking complex notions of parenting, nurturing, and care. In the context of the COVID-19 crisis—which is laying bare the destructive logic of racial capitalism—we recognize that there is no way to “go back to normal.” We must instead envision a radically different future, guided by questions of what kind of society are we producing, reproducing, and nurturing. Can we insist on the value of reproductive labor without ascribing a moralized or normative view of caretaking? How do these discourses come to bear on reproductive health/care, past and present?

We welcome proposals for papers on various aspects of reproduction, from any epoch and place, such as (but not limited to) those that seek to:

• Examine gender and reproduction in early modern and pre-modern times.
• Engage with the history and practice of nursing and midwifery, especially in light of the World Health Assembly’s designation of 2020 as the International Year of the Nurse and the Midwife.
• Explore the boundaries between reproduction, parenting, and reproductive labor.
• Reimagine health/care by interrogating the ways that communities, healthcare systems, and universities engage with the social structures that define or provide access to high-quality reproductive healthcare; historicize the barriers to accessing high-quality reproductive healthcare.
• Expose the history and practice of obstetric violence; highlight grassroots, scholarly, and legal activism against violations of people’s dignity during reproduction and childbirth.
• Interrogate the use of racialized risk calculators in obstetric and reproductive healthcare.
• Examine affect and emotion in reproductive healthcare, including people’s responses to emergency medical procedures such as hysterectomy.
• Analyze how reproduction intersects with mass incarceration, decarceration, depopulation, and abolition.

Address immigration and reproduction of the national body politic by analyzing detention and the use of violence to force the reproductive, care-based, and family choices of migrants, refugees, and their families; including, for example, the forced separation of migrants and refugees from their children.

Please submit a summary of your proposed contribution, approximately one page in length, by 15 September 2020 to the e-mail address criticalreproductivecare2021@gmail.com.


We ask you to state whether your contribution will take the form of a pre-circulated paper or video. Videos can contain the reading of a paper or another kind of contribution. Papers or videos will be circulated via a password-protected platform one month before the event, and panels will consist of group discussions of those contributions. Alternative formats to share your knowledge can also be proposed. There will be no charge for participation. The conference languages are English and Spanish, and we welcome proposals in either language.


We are grateful to generous sponsorship from the Johns Hopkins University Department of the History of Medicine, The Department of Gynecology and Obstetrics, The Center for Medical Humanities and Social Medicine, The Department of History, The Alexander Grass Humanities Institute, The Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, The Center on Racism Immigration and Citizenship, The Center for Africana Studies, The Program in Latin American Studies, and The Berman Institute of Bioethics.