To mark the recent publication of Tamar Novick’s Milk and Honey (MIT Press, 2023) and Jesse Olszynko-Gryn’s A Woman’s Right to Know (MIT Press, 2023) this event explores the environmental and social history of reproductive technologies in a globalising world, from late Ottoman Palestine to neoliberal Britain. A panel discussion will unpack the often-fraught entanglements between agricultural/medical innovation and animal/human fertility across the biopolitical regimes of settler colonialism and market capitalism. Along the way, we will encounter a range of actors, including beekeepers, goat herders, mouse breeders, toad collectors, and women as settlers, patients, producers, consumers, lab technicians, feminists, and a source of hormone-rich urine. The event will conclude with a screening and discussion of Lucy Beech’s Flush, a short film made with support of the MPIWG. All welcome!

Program