The Recent Work of Dr. Nancy Reame from the Motherhood and Technology Working Group
* Upson K. Hall MS, Shearston J, Schilling K, Yan B, Reame N, Talge N, Schertzing C, Kioumourtzoglou MA. Tampon use as a source of toxic metal exposure: Results from NHANES 2001-2004. 36th Annual Meeting of the Society for Pediatric and Perinatal Epidemiologic Research, Portland Ore, June 12-13, 2023.
* Gordián-Arroyo A, Reame N, Gutierrez J, Liu J, Ganzhorn S, Igwe KC, Laing K, Schnall R. Do correlates of white matter features differ between older men and women living with human immunodeficiency virus? Menopause. 2023 Feb 1;30(2):149-155.
An Update on the Tremendous Work of Motherhood & Tech WG Member George Estreich
Motherhood and Technology Working group member George Estreich, who recently became the Nonfiction Editor at literary magazine AGNI, published “Tlön, Uqbar, ChatGPT” in The Journal of Philosophy and Disability, Vol. 3, 2023.
His essay "Concision: A Sprawl," originally published in AGNI, was chosen by Vivian Gornick for The Best American Essays 2023.
In February, he was part of a panel at the Associated Writing Programs conference in Kansas City: "Writing and Intellectual Disability: An Inclusive Panel." This panel included both published writers and people with Down syndrome, including his daughter Laura.
Forthcoming Memoir by Motherhood & Technology Working Group Fellow Emily Bloom
Warm congratulations to Emily Bloom, a Motherhood and Technology Working Group member and Mellon Public Humanities Fellow at Sarah Lawrence University, for her forthcoming book, I Cannot Control Everything Forever: A Memoir of Motherhood, Science, and Art (St. Martin’s Press, 2024).
Fellow Working Group member Rachel Adams has praised the memoir, saying: “A big-hearted, wise, and beautifully written account of longing for and diving into motherhood, of parenting a child with unexpected challenges, and the technologies that sustain and complicate our lives. I wanted to read on to know what happened next and I did not want it to end.”
Motherhood & Technology WG Co-Directors to Guest-Edit Special Issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities
Motherhood and Technology Working Group Co-Directors, Arden Hegele and Rishi Goyal, to guest-edit a special issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities in the summer of 2024.
Motherhood and Technology Working Group Co-Directors, Arden Hegele and Rishi Goyal, are guest-editing a special issue of The Journal of Medical Humanities, planned to release in summer 2024. Entitled “Conception and Its Discontents,” and drawing its contributors from an eponymous conference held by the Working Group in May 2023, the issue will explore the pressures and deformations that burgeoning technologies and contemporary political and cultural norms place on the experience and meaning of reproduction. Articles will consider how technologies of reproduction have been taken up without full recognition of their political, legal, sociocultural, biological, or psychoanalytical impacts.
Motherhood & Tech WG Member Aya Labanieh Publishes "No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation" in LA Review of Books
Motherhood and Technology Working Group member Aya Labanieh has published a new article in the Los Angeles Review of Books, titled “No Fap: A Cultural History of Anti-Masturbation,” diving into the anxieties around masturbation throughout much of world history up to the present.
Motherhood & Technology WG Fellow to Deliver Public Lecture on the History of Hormones at Sarah Lawrence University
Sarah Lawrence University will host Motherhood and Technology Working Group member Randi Hutter Epstein, MD, MPH, for a lecture (open to the public) on the history of hormones (endocrinology) and the array of actors at play from doctors and parents to hucksters and sleuths. The event is based on Randi Hutter Epstein’s 2018 book Aroused: The History of Hormones and How They Control Just About Everything.
Scheduled for November 2, 2023, this event is sponsored by the Laura Kirchman Manuelidis '63 Science and Literary Arts Endowment Fund.
Katherine Bergevin's Op. Ed. on Reproductive Freedom in Washington Post
Katherine Bergevin’s May 17, 2023 op. ed., “Like today, 18th-century laws about pregnancy aimed to control women,” was published in the Washington Post.
Motherhood and Technology | Rishi Goyal and Arden Hegele Publication, “Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities”
Congratulations to Rishi Goyal and Arden Hegele, Motherhood and Technology working group co-directors, on the recent publication of their new book, Culture and Medicine: Critical Readings in the Health and Medical Humanities, by Bloomsbury Press!
Working group member Nancy reame contributes to "Changing Practices in ICS - international commercial surrogacy" for the website Surrogacy360.org
Working group member Nancy Reame was an invited contributor to the resource, "Changing Practices in ICS - international commercial surrogacy" for the website Surrogacy360.org, a collaborative project between the Center for Genetics and Our Bodies, Ourselves Today. Launched in 2016, Surrogacy360 provides unbiased information for the public, independent of industry influence or commercial advertising.
See link to surrogacy360.org website here
CSSD group member Aya Labanieh publishes an article in 'Journal of Postcolonial Writing'
In December 2022, CSSD group member Aya Labanieh’s article “Can the Subaltern Laugh? Humour, Translatability, and the Inequalities of World Literature” was published in the Journal of Postcolonial Writing
See link to article here [link to external website]
Meredith Gamer Lectures at Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art
Assistant Professor Gamer’s two online lectures focused on the works of artist William Hogarth.
Assistant Professor Meredith Gamer participated in this year’s Yale University Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art Artist in Focus Public Lecture Series. Professor Gamer’s lectures focused on two works by etching artist William Hogarth: Industry and Idleness (1747) and The Four Stages of Cruelty (1751). Assistant Professor of Art History, Gamer is a member of CSSD’s Motherhood and Technology working group.
Watch the full lectures here.
Motherhood and Technology working group fellow publishes book review in Public Books
Emily Bloom wrote a review of Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars.
Motherhood and Technology working group fellow, Emily Bloom wrote about gothic literature's ability to convey the claustrophobia of motherhood during a pandemic in her review of Emma Donoghue's The Pull of the Stars, in Public Books.
To learn more about the work of Motherhood and Technology and its fellows visit the working group page here.
Motherhood and Technology Co-Director Interviewed by the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes
Rishi Goyal discussed his experience working in emergency medicine during the pandemic and about critical initiatives that the humanities bring to creating better healthcare.
In a piece titled, Humanities in the Emergency Room, Rishi Goyal, Columbia University Medical Center emergency department physician and co-director of the Motherhood and Technology working group, was interviewed by Jason Rozumalski of the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI) about the importance of humanities in medical science and an interdisciplinary approach to health.
Motherhood and Technology Co-Director Pens Piece for Columbia News
Arden Hegele’s article, What We Can Learn from the Literature of Past Pandemics, discusses how fiction can help frame our responses to the pandemic and serve as a guide for what happens next.
Arden Hegele, co-director of the CSSD Motherhood and Technology working group, in her article, What We Can Learn from the Literature of Past Pandemics pulls lessons from classics such as Oedipus Rex, The Iliad, Daniel Defoe’s The Journal of the Plague Year, and Edgar Allan Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death to help us better understand the COVID-19 epidemic.
Three New Working Groups at CSSD Launching Fall 2020
Black Atlantic Ecologies, Insurgent Domesticities, and Motherhood and Technology working groups to launch this year.
Three new working groups, coming from a highly competitive selection process, will be launching at the Center for the Study of Social Difference (CSSD) in the 2020-2021 academic year. CSSD projects address gender, race, sexuality, and other forms of inequality to foster ethical and progressive social change.
Black Atlantic Ecologies
The Black Atlantic Ecologies group supports and elaborates scholarship that centers the enduring effects of coloniality and the dynamic power of protest in African diasporic confrontations with environmental crisis. Taking as their provocation the refiguring of human and nonhuman ecologies occasioned by the transatlantic slave trade, the Black Atlantic Ecologies working group seeks to understand what Nadia Ellis has called, riffing on José Muñoz, “the queer work of raced survival” as they come to grips with contemporary dimensions of anthropogenic climate change. As inspiration for the work that they undertake, they ask after visions for survival and justice that are grounded in Black queer, Black feminist, and antiracist responses to the subjugation of the earth as well as to human and nonhuman cotravelers.
This group is supported via CSSD’s partnership with Columbia’s Earth Institute.
Project Directors:
Vanessa Agard-Jones Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University
Marisa Solomon Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College
Insurgent Domesticities
Insurgent Domesticities is a platform that interrogates the politics of ‘home’ through histories of solidarity, disobedience, stealth, and militancy, from the scale of the clothesline to that of the state. These bring into view the fine-grained intricacies and intimacies of ‘home’ as constituted through insurgent objects and practices. The Insurgent Domesticities working group seeks liberatory historiographical approaches existing within and between territories and institutions, within the present worldwide protectionist climate, in which ‘home’ is still a fiercely pursued, maintained, and guarded space.
Project Director:
Anooradha Iyer Siddiqi, Assistant Professor, Department of Architecture, and affiliated faculty, Department of Art History, Barnard College, Columbia University
Motherhood and Technology
Utilizing interdisciplinary membership, this CSSD working group will engage in a global examination of how medical technologies have changed and have been changed by the experience of motherhood. In particular, the Motherhood and Technology working group will explore some of the problems and dilemmas within the following areas, among others: rapid advances in cryogenics, surrogacy as a mainstream technology, the circulation of new genomic techniques worldwide, and advanced reproductive technologies (ART). In exploring these issues, the Motherhood and Technology working group is guided by the interdisciplinary approach of the medical humanities.
Project Directors:
Rishi Goyal Assistant Professor, Emergency Medicine; Director, Medicine, Literature and Society, Columbia University
Arden Hegele Medical Humanities Fellow, Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities; Lecturer, English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University