Suchergebnisse

Abstract
Scholarship establishes that assisted reproductive technology (ART) implementation often stratifies the logics of who can (and should) reproduce. However, we know less about how social inequalities inform practices and reproductive logics within fertility clinics and across contexts. Mobilizing the concept of strategic naturalization and denaturalization (SN/SD) – the conceptual reconfiguration of an egg's heritable components – this article addresses that gap. Examining clinic-based egg donation arrangements in Kolkata, India, and the United States' San Francisco Bay Area, it addresses when and why reproductive logics are developed using SN/SD and how this development varies based on a country's race, class, and gender dynamics. Using participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study explains why certain traits are conceptualized as genetic versus social during donor-patient matching and highlights variation across sociocultural sites. In both sites, actors use SN/SD to reimagine eggs to confer social advantage, navigating three structural and contextual axes while doing so: (1) clinical structures and policies, (2) donor pool characteristics, and (3) degree of technological reliance. Though resulting logics to reimagine donor eggs vary, reproductive strategies in both sites ultimately reflect existing social hierarchies that prioritize norms associated with hegemonic upper middle-class families.

AbstractThis study compares the regulation of two emerging technologies, the CRISPR genome‐editing system and Connected and Autonomous Vehicles (CAV) in the United States. The study draws on 33 in‐depth interviews with innovation and governance experts to study the relationship between their regulatory environments and developing beliefs about these technologies. Using sociotechnical imaginaries as a framework, we explore how social actors envision technologically driven futures and the social order that enables them. These imaginaries are essential to emerging technologies, where experts build a framework of potentialities for innovation still underway. While scholarship has documented how sociotechnical imaginaries arise among policymakers, groups of scientists, state and local stakeholders, and public actors in different countries, less has been said about how regulatory organizations and their actors shape expectations around technologies that are in the early and middle stages of development. This article finds that regulatory institutions shape emerging imaginaries along three related axes: the distribution of authority, technological novelty, and risk. Interviewees negotiate these three contingencies differently based on relevant extant regulatory structures and ideologies, resulting in distinct imaginaries around each technology. CRISPR actors envision genome editing as largely diminishing biomedical harm and eventually suitable for health markets, while CAV actors diverge on whether self‐driving cars alleviate or exacerbate risk and how they may enter roads. That organizational structures and practices of regulation inform broadly held sociotechnical imaginaries bears significance for studies of innovation trajectories, suggesting regulators can take an active role in shaping how risks and benefits of emerging technology are defined.