Corinna Sabrina Guerzoni

In this workshop, we argue that the changing global context requires new approaches to conducting ‘traditional’ anthropological fieldwork. Many of us as researchers became less mobile under Covid, and many had already been so earlier, for example due to caring and family responsibilities. As anthropologists of reproduction, we had already been investigating different ways of conducting research. The workshop brings together some of the most influential anthropologists of reproduction, who have been developing unique concepts and methodologies to grapple with relationships between local worlds and global mobilities in their transnational research on surrogacy, IVF, gamete and embryo donation, stem cell treatment, adoption, and abortion. This workshop’s agenda is to advance ethnographic methods, and consolidate the new field of Methods in Reproductive Anthropology. The Changing Repro-Ethnographies workshop focuses on two main themes, both of which are epistemologically related to methodology: mobility, and translation. During the first day, we focus on the concept of mobility. In particular, we explore innovative ways of conducting ethnographic research, ranging from the taken-for-granted expectation of long-term mobility during fieldwork to patchwork ethnography. During the second day, we focus on translation. We reflect on how problems and concepts travel not only through global activisms on reproductive rights and justice but also through transnational reproduction itself undertaken by queer, infertile and other would-be parents, alongside transnational abortion travel.