Abstract
This dissertation explores how bodies, temporalities, and orientations become
figured, configured, and reconfigured within everyday practices of fertility
sensemaking. Fertility sensemaking refers to the ways people understand their
bodies through data (e.g., about them, or in relation to statistics), alongside
socio-cultural norms of reproduction and temporal scripts. Such practices
become increasingly supported by various technologies that enter homes,
clinics, and bodies, to generate and analyze data around reproductive bodies. It is thus necessary to understand how such data practices, and the technologies they enroll, augment and afford relations to, and understandings of, fertility.
Throughout this dissertation I develop a qualitative analysis of fertility
sensemaking that is grounded in interdisciplinary engagements with work in
feminist theory, Human-computer interaction (HCI), and Science and
Technology Studies (STS), and anchors in theories on posthumanism and
crip/queer temporalities. I build on a range of empirical material, including
bodily experiences around data obtained through mundane reproductive
technologies, such as Menstruation and Fertility Tracking Applications
(MFTAs), online forums, as well as medicalized datafication practices in Fertility Awareness Counseling (FAC), to scrutinize how different sites of datafication (the intimate, the shared, the medicalized) participate in the re-con-figuration of fertility. Rather than only being a ‘quality of the body’, this dissertation brings forth a conception of fertility as entangled, material, and relational practices.
The three papers included in this dissertation contribute to HCI, STS, as well
as feminist theory, and argue respectively 1) how reproductive bodies become
figured through the datafication technologies; 2) how different objects and
subjects come together, and configure fertile time and temporalities through
relational and distributed practices of fertility sensemaking; and 3) how
orientations to fertility become reconfigured in terms of possibility, time, and
space, as infertility rather than fertility becomes anticipated.
figured, configured, and reconfigured within everyday practices of fertility
sensemaking. Fertility sensemaking refers to the ways people understand their
bodies through data (e.g., about them, or in relation to statistics), alongside
socio-cultural norms of reproduction and temporal scripts. Such practices
become increasingly supported by various technologies that enter homes,
clinics, and bodies, to generate and analyze data around reproductive bodies. It is thus necessary to understand how such data practices, and the technologies they enroll, augment and afford relations to, and understandings of, fertility.
Throughout this dissertation I develop a qualitative analysis of fertility
sensemaking that is grounded in interdisciplinary engagements with work in
feminist theory, Human-computer interaction (HCI), and Science and
Technology Studies (STS), and anchors in theories on posthumanism and
crip/queer temporalities. I build on a range of empirical material, including
bodily experiences around data obtained through mundane reproductive
technologies, such as Menstruation and Fertility Tracking Applications
(MFTAs), online forums, as well as medicalized datafication practices in Fertility Awareness Counseling (FAC), to scrutinize how different sites of datafication (the intimate, the shared, the medicalized) participate in the re-con-figuration of fertility. Rather than only being a ‘quality of the body’, this dissertation brings forth a conception of fertility as entangled, material, and relational practices.
The three papers included in this dissertation contribute to HCI, STS, as well
as feminist theory, and argue respectively 1) how reproductive bodies become
figured through the datafication technologies; 2) how different objects and
subjects come together, and configure fertile time and temporalities through
relational and distributed practices of fertility sensemaking; and 3) how
orientations to fertility become reconfigured in terms of possibility, time, and
space, as infertility rather than fertility becomes anticipated.
| Originalsprog | Engelsk |
|---|---|
| Kvalifikation | Doktor i filosofi (ph.d.) |
| Vejleder(e) |
|
| Bevillingsdato | 28 feb. 2025 |
| Udgiver | |
| ISBN'er, trykt | 978-87-7949-534-0 |
| Status | Udgivet - 2025 |