Research Program
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I was mid-fieldwork when the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization in June 2022. Shortly after, I published an essay in Somatosphere on the post-Roe politics of in vitro fertilization. Using a materialist framework, I consider how embryologists form affective and intimate relationships with the embryos they culture.
Read it here:
Making Embryos Lively: The politics of embryo personhood when fertilization happens under a microscope
In my dissertation, I trace five stages through which embryos materialize and gain meaning—fertilization, culture (cultivation), transfer, freezing, and discard. I center the perspectives of embryologists who work most closely with human embryos in the lab every day. I argue that embryologists form shifting orientations to embryos as they move through these processes.
My research program connects the embryology lab to a constellation of other spaces that dot the landscape of in/fertility. My ethnographic research has brought me into reproductive endocrinology operating rooms, medical research laboratories, animal research facilities, medical conferences, Catholic cemeteries, and beyond.
I am currently revising an article in which I theorize embryos as ontologically ‘multiple’ (Mol 2002) and ‘slippery’ (Helmreich 2014) entities—highly politicized things that evade static categorization. Drawing on original ethnographic data, I demonstrate how embryologists enact complex understandings of ‘life’ as they grow and manage embryos every day.
