This event explored how AI technologies have changed the narratives and rationalities that underpin assisted reproduction, from early feminist initiatives to the commercialization of pregnancy, as well as the tactics used in scientific research on human reproduction. It considered how these dynamics map onto racial disparities and wider inequalities in public health and beyond.

Charis Thompson is Chancellor’s Professor and Associate Dean for Campus Partnerships, and a former founding director of the Science, Technology, and Society Center at UC Berkeley. She is an expert on the ethics of reproductive technologies and stem cell research. She read philosophy, psychology, and physiology at Oxford University, and got her Ph.D. from the Science Studies program at UC San Diego.  She is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies, which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Award from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of Good Science: The Ethical Choreography of Stem Cell Research. She is a recipient of the Social Science Division Distinguished Teaching Award and an Honorary Doctorate for Services to Science and Society from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Last year she was Visiting Professor at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, co-convening the seminar on Science and the State. She served on the World Economic Forum Global Future Council on Technology, Values, and Policy, and the Nuffield Working Group on Human Genome Modification.

Natali Valdez is an anthropologist who specializes in feminist and ethnographic methodologies. Her work lies at the intersections of feminist techno-science, medical anthropology, and public health. Her teaching and research attend to how histories of violence and racism are enveloped into scientific knowledge production. She draws from Black feminism and postcolonial feminist science studies to explore the entanglements between nature-culture, science-society, and the human-nonhuman.  Her current book project, Weighing the Future explores the clinical translation of epigenetics in randomized clinical trials that experiment on pregnant bodies. As the first ethnography of its kind, Weighing the Future illuminates how processes of postgenomic knowledge production are linked to capitalism, surveillance, and systemic racism.  Her other research interests explore issues of big data in evidence-based medicine; feminist materiality in environmental racism; and the creative ways in which feminist and ethnographic methods can be used to study scientific methods.

The event was moderated by Mona Sloane and supported by NYU’s Institute for Public Knowledge, the NYU Center for Responsible AI, the 370 Jay Project, and the NYU Tandon Department of Technology, Culture and Society.