Cambridge Reading Group on Reproduction brings together researchers from across the university to engage in interdisciplinary discussion, led by senior academics, all with a central theme of reproduction.
Join the conversation! All welcome, postgraduate students and staff.
Meetings take place in central Cambridge. Sessions start with an optional sandwich lunch at 12:30pm, discussion from 1-2pm, finishing by 2.30pm
-----------------------------------
Coming up!
Date: Tuesday, 26 November, 2024 - 12:30 to 14:30
Location: Room CGO9 @ Student Services Centre - Old Cavendish East Wing
Barriers to progress in pregnancy research: How can we break through?
Led by Dr Catherine Aiken - Honorary Consultant in Maternal and Fetal Medicine
Reading:
Sarah J. Stock, Catherine E. Aiken, Barriers to progress in pregnancy research: How can we break through? Science 380,150-153 (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.adf9347
Register for access to the full article on Moodle, and for catering.
Introduction:
Excluding reformulations, in the past 30 years, only two drugs have been licensed for use in pregnancy. At the same time, pregnancy complications are increasing, with profound implications for immediate and life-course health of both infants and mothers. This paper discusses some of the barriers to progress in developing safe and effective treatments for pregnancy complications, including systemic social and political factors; deliberate exclusion of pregnant women from research; the complexity of the dynamic maternal-placental-fetal system; uncertainty about the relevance of in vitro and animal models to inaccessible in vivo systems and processes; and disparities in pregnancy outcomes within and between countries.
-----------------------------------
Past Sessions
Tuesday 29th October - Room CG09, Old Cavendish Wing, Student Services, New Museums site.
Led by Professor Samita Sen, Faculty of History.
Text to be discussed:
Ferguson, S. 2017. Children, Childhood and Capitalism. In Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping
Class, Recentering Oppression, ed. Tithi Bhattacharya. London: Pluto, pp. 112-30 (Chapter 6)
Starting 12.30 with lunch, group 1-2pm, closing 2.30pm.
Introduction to the reading by Samita Sen
The essay explores the dynamic and contested relationship between capitalism and childhood. It maps the contradictions of the relations of social reproduction within which childhood is historically constructed.
Rather than starting from consumption, as is more usual these days, the essay explores the relationship between childhood and labour. There have been historical and contemporary accounts of child labour, that is, situations in which children are directly engaged in labouring relations.
This essay addresses the child as future labour. It underlines the tension between the social reproduction of children and childhoods and the expansion of capitalism. It illuminates some of the ambiguities embedded in the figure of the child within capitalism, asking also whether there are radical political possibilities in imaginaries of childhood.
-------------------------
Tuesday 26th November - Room CG09, Old Cavendish Wing, Student Services, New Museums site.
Led by Dr Catherine Aiken, Honorary Consultant in Maternal and Fetal Medicine. Text for discussion to follow!
Starting 12.30 with lunch, group 1-2pm, closing 2.30pm.
Sign up to join for the latest updates.
-------------------------
Previous texts
Friday 21st June - Room 78, Anatomy Building with Professor Ashley Moffett, Professor of Reproductive Immunology in the Department of Pathology.
Introduction: Recent articles in the Guardian (see links below) discuss the increased prevalence of pre-eclampsia in women with African ancestry. This is well known, as is the associated increased risk of stillbirth, preterm labour and fetal growth restriction in these women all leading to poor maternal and fetal outcomes. These conditions arise because of defective placentation early in pregnancy and affect at least 10% of pregnancies.
Thursday 30th May - Room 78, Anatomy Building with Dr Emma Pomeroy
There is an obstetrical dilemma: Misconceptions about the evolution of human childbirth and pelvic form
American Journal of Biological Anthropology: Volume 181, Issue 4 Aug 2023
Wednesday 11 October 2023
François Jacob, The Logic of Life (selection). Introduced by Professor Nick Hopwood (HPS).
For the first session in October we read parts of a history of biology that proposed an influential argument about how research came to focus on reproduction.
Tuesday 28 November 2023
The Second Creation by Ian Wilmut, Keith Campbell and Colin Tudge. Introduced by Professor Sarah Franklin (Sociology).
Wednesday 24 January 2024
Oldak, B., Wildschutz, E., Bondarenko, V. et al. Complete human day 14 post-implantation embryo models from naive ES cells. Nature 622, 562–573 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-023-06604-5. Introduced by Professor Kathy Niakan (PDN).
Wednesday 27 February 2024
Jens M. Scherpe, 'Breaking the Existing Paradigms of Parent–Child Relationships', in International and National Perspectives on Child and Family Law, pp. 343 - 359 (CUP, 2018). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781780687001.028. Introduced by Dr Brian Sloan (Law).
Thanks to the School of the Humanities and Social Sciences for research framework funding
