Conferences

Reframing the Biological Clock: Exploring Ageing and Reproduction in Contemporary Ethnographies

17-18 August 2018, Department of Liberal Arts, IITH in association with Wellcome UK

Emerging from the research on ageing and assisted reproduction in India, the conference brought together scholars and academicians from across the world to discuss ideas regarding menopause, male infertility, demography, oocyte freezing, etc.

One of the lesser researched, and yet socially significant problem across the world, remains the politics of conception as women and men age. Though the notion of the ‘biological clock’ is expressly marked on women’s bodies; the terrains of desire, fertility and conjugal-family life, are now increasingly associated with the declining body across genders, and the fear of the ticking biological clock. Marked by the intervention of different kinds of reproductive technologies, our anxieties about our bodies need newer academic engagement and analysis.

This Workshop engaged with the ways in which the biological clock is framed within anthropological conversations on ageing, reproduction, technology and contemporary understandings of the body and biology. Firmly embedded within the anthropology of medicine and reproduction, the workshop is nonetheless interested in the interface that is generated through kinship, the life cycle, technological interventions (such as assisted reproduction)—to the ways in which the biological clock comes to be imagined.

Scholars, researchers and academics researched the imaginings involved in conceptualizing age, the ageing body and its concomitant trajectories. These trajectories can involve varied forms of understanding including that of the identification of decline, youth and youthfulness, the processes of managing declining bodies and selves, structural components that facilitate the negotiations with age, ageing and the body. Themes included:

The declining body
The body as time and clock
Medicalization of age and ageing/ The technological manipulation of the reproductive body
The gendered biological clock?
Conceptualizations of the life cycle
The Inter-generational contract
Cultural understandings of the biological clock
Demographic conundrums and the reproductive state

IIT Hyderabad organises workshop on 'Reframing the Biological Clock'It brought together a set of scholars exploring the dynamics of ageing and reproduction through the lens of egg freezing, menopause, male infertility and sex ratio deficit.

IIT-H hosts international workshop on reproduction‘The conference gave us a comparative perspective on ageing and reproduction’

Reproduction, Demography and Cultural Anxieties in India and China in the 21^st Century

20-21 February 2020, in collaboration with the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi and Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi