Latest publications and media coverage

Surrogate baby Inaya Hundreds of children of surrogate mothers live in Switzerland. They were born into a legal
gray area. The case of the B. family now occupies the highest court.

Carolin Schurr, Heike Mayer and Andrea Winiger wrote a blog entry on Gendercampus about the results of a survey in the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, which revealed the crisis’ uneven care responsibilities. While acknowledging these unequal effects, our blog calls for considering the current crisis as an opportunity to constituting a new academic norm/ality: The care-giving academic.

Abstract

Feminist political geographies complicate our understanding of nationalisms, unraveling the gendered, racist, sexualized and classed logics that enable and legitimize nationalist projects and experiences. Scholarship on the “national intimate” usefully re-centers those feminized and trivialized mundane practices, bodily experiences, subjects and spaces that in fact powerfully reproduce nationalist sentiments. I draw on this reframing here, demonstrating the insights of a feminist geographic critique of national enjoyment in Azerbaijan. In particular, I mobilize Sara Ahmed’s figure of the feminist “killjoy” to unmask how national enjoyment obscures and yet reproduces patriarchal, heterosexist and racist narratives and mundane bodily encounters. Examining national enjoyment around men’s football, women’s beauty, smoking and heterosexual marriage, I attend to the oft-ignored but vital embodied sites and objects involved in reproducing enjoyment in national meaning. I show the conditions that are necessary for different bodies to gain access to national enjoyment, and the emotional, bodily and economic investments that are necessary to navigate heteronormative, patriarchal and racialized alignments in enjoying the nation. Feminist, critical race and queer theory has unequivocally demonstrated that nationalisms depend on—indeed cannot be separated from—the workings of patriarchy, misogyny, racism and heterosexism. As geographers, moving forward, it is vital that we attend to this work if we are to better understand the ordinary power of national enjoyment.

Abstract

Feminist geographic analysis has demonstrated that violence inflicted on women is embodied, experienced and personal and at the same time, linked to global socio-political and economic processes and patriarchal norms. Consequently, violence is a complex system instead of a norm located in certain places. In heavily militarised societies, patriarchal power regimes are even more prevalent because states’ security strategies promote a masculinist understanding of protection as to who should be protected and by whom – and from what. This study draws on feminist geopolitical analysis and explores how feminist activists in Honduras experience and resist violence in their everyday lives. The research is grounded in interviews, focus-group discussions and participant observation with Honduran activists. The findings demonstrate that violence and its effects are first embedded in women’s everyday lives through feelings of fear and unsafety on the streets, at the workplace and at home. Second, violence operates through structures and institutions such as the military and police, impunity for violence against women and the juridical restriction of reproductive rights. Third, the internationally financed war on drugs and ‘development’ projects contribute to violence, thus, there is a link between intimate experiences of violence and global economic and military powers that sustain violence. Activists therefore argue that, for their needs, the state’s and international organisations’ security approaches are inadequate. The paper weaves together feminist visions of collective self-care and discusses activists’ strategies against violence. This study contributes to a growing feminist geographic scholarship linking women’s bodily experiences with violence and responds to calls for complicating notions of violence

Abstract

Reproductive rights are about the legal right to contraception, abortion, fertility treatment, reproductive health, and access to information about one's reproductive body. Reproductive rights secure people's freedom to decide about their body's capacities to (not) reproduce. Departing from a feminist understanding of the reproductive body as the most intimate site for/of political struggle, reproductive geographies have emerged as a relatively new field within human geography. Reproduction used to be a traditional topic of a quantitative population geography. More recent geographic work on reproduction, however, is inspired by feminist, Black, postcolonial, and critical theories to address the uneven geographies of access to spaces of reproductive health and justice. Research in the field of reproductive geography increasingly employs an intersectional perspective investigating how questions of reproductive rights intersect with environmental, racial, sexual, and gender justice. While research on intimate geopolitics looks at how reproductive freedom and autonomy are embedded in wider geopolitical, geoeconomic, and biopolitical power relations, reproductive geographies study the spaces, mobilities, and practices of fertility, pregnancy, and birth.

Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr, together with Prof. Dr. Peter Weichhart (University of Vienna), opened the German Congress for Geography in Kiel 2019 with her keynote speech "From Margin to Center? Theoretische Aufbrüche in der Geographie seit Kiel 1969"

Chinwe Ifejika Speranza (Bern), Martin Müller (Lausanne), Carolin Schurr (Bern) and Karin Schwiter (Zürich) are now part of the international Advisory Board of the Geographica Helvetica. 

Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr and Prof. Dr. Peter Weichhart (University Vienna) are opening the Deutschen Kongress für Geographie in Kiel 2019 with their keynote lecture „From Margin to Center? Theoretische Aufbrüche in der Geographie seit Kiel 1969“

Chinwe Ifejika Speranza (Berne), Martin Müller (Lausanne), Carolin Schurr (Berne) and Karin Schwiter (Zurich) are also joining the international advisory board. Ulrike Müller-Böker will step down as a member.

For their paper "The affective economy of transnational surrogacy”, Carolin Schurr and Elisabeth Militz won the Ashby prize. Below an excerpt of their statement regarding winnig the prize:

"In April 2019, I (Carolin) was wandering around in Sacre Coeur Paris, waiting for my mother to finish her visit. We were there, as a happy family, my mum, my three siblings and my 10-month-old baby to celebrate my mum’s 70th birthday. A bit bored, I opened my email. I stumbled. “Ashby Prize.” That must be the call to apply for this honorable prize. I think about Leigh Johnson with whom I shared an office—our “pregnant belly office” as we called it—during her and my first pregnancy in Zurich and who had just been awarded the prize back then for her paper “Index insurance and the articulation of risk-bearing subjects” (2013). Yet, I can’t believe what I read. Us, being awarded the Ashby Prize? For a paper that had taken so many twists and turns? Whose reviewers have been sometimes enthusiastic, but more often quite critical, unconvinced by our attempt to bring geographies of marketization together with affect, emotions, and Sara Ahmed’s critique of the happy family, to understand global family-making with the help of Mexican surrogate mothers? This clearly must be a misunderstanding!"

Carolin Schurr’s paper "Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations" co-authored with Martin Müller (University of Lausanne) is for the second year the most downloaded paper from the RGS-IBG Journal "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers“. The paper received 4,136 full-text downloads from the site in 2018 (average download in 2018 was 147).

Abstract

This paper shows that assemblage thinking and actor‐network theory (ANT) have much more to gain from each other than debate has so far conceded. Exploring the conjunctions and disjunctions between the two approaches, it proposes three cross‐fertilisations that have implications for understanding three key processes in our socio‐material world: stabilisation, change and affect. First, the conceptual vocabulary of ANT can enrich assemblage thinking with an explicitly spatial account of the ways in which assemblages are drawn together, reach across space and are stabilised. Second, each approach is better attuned to conceptualising a particular kind of change in socio‐material relations: ANT describes change without rupture, or fluidity, whereas assemblage thinking describes change with rupture, or events. Third and last, assemblage thinking could fashion ANT with a greater sensitivity for the productive role of affect in bringing socio‐material relations into being through the production of desire/wish (désir). We demonstrate the implications of these cross‐fertilisations for empirical work through a case study of the global market for assisted reproduction.

At the end of her Branco Weiss Fellowship, Carolin Schurr presented the results of her study about the global surrogay market at the annual Branco Weiss Symposium (ETH Zurich) on the 20. november 2018.

Carolin Schurr talked with the radio station RFI about surrogacy, the desire of becoming parents and the commercialization of women. The interview, which was held in Spanish, can be found online.

Schurr, Carolin. Multiple mobilities in Mexico’s fertility industry, Mobilities (2018): 1-17.

Abstract

How can we conceptualize travel in search of fertility treatment? While current research on transnational reproduction mostly conceptualizes mobility as horizontal movement from A to B, this article shows how horizontal mobilities converge, contradict, and are interdependent with other forms of mobility; namely vertical mobilities in terms of social upward and downward mobility, representational mobilities in form of imaginative geographies, and the actual embodied experiences of mobility. Based on ethnographic research on the reproductive tourism industry in Mexico, the article explores the multiplicity of mobilities that constitute transnational reproduction. The article evaluates how the concept of multiple mobilities contributes to the study of medical tourism from a critical mobilities’ perspective.

Since August 2018 is Carolin Schurr part of the Editorial Board of Gender, Place and Culture: A journal of feminist geography.

Link here

Schurr, Carolin. ‘The Baby Business Booms: Economic Geographies of Assisted Reproduction’. Geography Compass, online first.

Abstract

This paper explores how reproductive life has changed through the development, transnational spread, and commercialization of assisted reproductive technologies (in vitro fertilization, gamete donation, and surrogacy). (Economic) geography has been slow to take up the vibrant debates in anthropology, sociology, gender studies, and other neighboring disciplines on assisted reproductive technologies and their effects on society, kinship, and reproduction. In this paper, I argue that an analysis of the fast‐growing transnational market of assisted reproduction has much to gain from economic geographies with their interest in the making of markets across borders and feminist economic geographers' engagement with how new forms of gendered and racialized divisions of labor intersect with particular economic, cultural, political, and social contexts. I discuss literature on assisted reproductive technologies and their transnational economies against the background of these two issues—the transnational making of fertility markets and the global division of reproductive labor along axes of gender, race, class, and nationality. The conclusion points out the need for articulating geographies of assisted reproduction that integrate a geographic perspective into the study of assisted reproductive technologies and reproductive economic geographies that push the boundaries of economic geography towards the economies of (assisted) reproduction.