New Books, New Feminist Directions
In Fall 2021, the Gender Institute established a book launch series called “New Books, New Feminist Directions,” in which faculty can share and discuss their recent monographs with UB’s Gender Institute community, as well as the wider virtual community. These hybrid events will include a guest commentator who will discuss the significance of the book and its relevance for the field. This series highlights the superb feminist scholarship at UB, while also celebrating a colleague’s achievement.
SPRING 2024 Events
Meghana Joshi
Teaching Assistant Professor, Department of Anthropology, University at Buffalo
Children are Everywhere: Conspicuous Reproduction and Childlessness in Reunified Berlin
with commentary from Professor Dr. Anika König, Freie Universität Berlin, Institut für Sozial- und Kulturanthropologie
Friday, March 15, 2024
12:00 - 1:30pm (EST)
via Zoom
Free and open to the public.
Children are Everywhere engages with how demographic anxieties and reproductive regimes emerge as forms of social inclusion and exclusion in a low fertility Western European context. This book explores everyday experiences of parenting and childlessness of ‘ethnic’ Germans in Berlin, who came of age around the fall of the Berlin Wall, and brings them into conversation with theories on parenting, waithood, non-biological intimacies, and masculinities. This is the first ethnographic work by a South Asian author on demographic anxieties and reproduction in Germany and reverses the anthropological gaze to study Europe as the ‘Other.’
Meghana Joshi has an M.A. and M.Phil. in Social Work with a specialization in Child Welfare and Reproductive Health from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, India. Subsequently, she has worked on issues of childlessness, stigma, and medical treatment in urban slums in Mumbai, and on maternal and community health in the rural Himalayas. She finished her PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in 2017. After a brief stint at Central Washington University, she has been employed as Teaching Assistant Professor in the Anthropology Department at UB since 2018. Her book on gendered reproduction, fertility anxieties, intensive parenting, and childlessness is based on research in Berlin, Germany. She teaches on Medical Anthropology, Culture and Reproduction, Men and Masculinities, and Ethnographic Research. Her newly developing research interests include anthropology of loneliness and emergent forms of care.
Anika König is visiting professor at the Insitute for Social and Cultural Anthropology, Freie Universität Berlin. Her work focuses on reproduction, especially transnational surrogacy, genetic testing, kinship, care, and gender. She has also worked extensively on violence, the senses and the body. Her recent work investigates the effects of major crises like the Covid pandemic or the war in Ukraine on the global fertility industry, and the gender health gap in Germany with a particular focus on endometriosis. Her work has appeared, among others, in Medical Anthropology, Biosocieties, New Genetics and Society, and Social Anthropology.