Mirko
Winkel

Mirko Winkel is the coordinator of the mLAB. The artist and curator teaches at the University of Bern and other places with the aim of synthesizing art with scientific research and socio-political concerns.

Susan
Thieme

Susan Thieme is professor of Critical Sustainability Studies at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern. She brought the Global Science Film Festival to Bern and co-developed the Social Learning Video Method. She is co-founder of the mLAB. MORE

Carolin
Schurr

Carolin Schurr is professor of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. As a feminist geographer, she has developed and experimented with affectual and visual methods to grasp the emotional effects of globalization processes on our intimate lives. She is co-founder of the mLAB. MORE

Alexander
Vorbrugg

Alexander Vorbrugg is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in Critical Sustainability Studies at the University of Bern. His research interests include visual forms of research and science communication. He is part of the coordination group of the mLAB. MORE

Laura
Perler

Laura Perler is a postdoctoral researcher in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. In her research she investigates inequalities in relation to reproductive technologies and the Swiss asylum system. In her projects she uses audiovisual approaches and collaborates with artists. Together with Mirko Winkel, she is currently organizing a traveling exhibition on egg donation. She is part of the coordination group of the mLAB. MORE

Stefan
Brönnimann

Stefan Brönnimann is a professor in Climatology at the University of Bern. His research focuses on weather and climate reconstruction, climate models, climate dynamics, effects of volcanic eruptions on climate and climate and society interactions. MORE

Elisabeth
Militz

Elisabeth Militz is an Assistant Professor for Social and Digital Geographies at the University of Innsbruck. As a feminist political and cultural geographer, her focus lies on global/intimate relations and digital transformations. She experiments with affectual and feminist digital methodologies for human geographies. MORE

Adrien
Mestrot

Adrien Mestrot is a professor in Soil Science at the University of Bern. Part of his research topics is analyzing the biogeochemistry of soils under global change to improve environmental health and food production. MORE

Nora
Komposch

Nora Komposch is a PhD student and assistant in Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern. Her research interests are geographies of the body, care and reproduction, migration and labor, and politics of the global intimate. MORE

Prisca Pfammatter

Prisca Pfammatter (she/her) is a PhD student in Critical Sustainability Studies at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern. Her research explores the experiences of queer farmworkers in Switzerland, using dance-based methodologies to examine the intersections of gender, sex, sexuality, and social sustainability in agriculture.

Johanna
Paschen

Johanna Paschen is a PhD student in Critical Sustainability Studies at the University of Bern. Her research interests include social and environmental justice, transdisciplinarity and artistic research. In cooperation with the Academy of the Arts Bern, she is involved with the research project EcoArtLab. MORE

Luca
Tschiderer

Luca Tschiderer is a PhD student in Critical Sustainability Studies at the University of Bern. His research focuses on alternative practices of work in health- and care related contexts. As part of his PhD project he uses social learning videos as a participatory method towards workers inquiry. MORE

Sarah
Hartmann

Sarah Hartmann is a Postdoc student in Critical Sustainability Studies at the University of Bern. Her research looks at issues around work, transnational mobilities and future transformations in healthcare from a critical sustainability perspective. MORE

6th Global Science Film Festival 2024

Queering Gender, Work, and the Family Farm

Reflections on the EcoArtLab Residency

7th Science Filmmaking Marathon

Final Presentation: «Dialogue as a means to understanding and empathy»

Book Launch - Vom Baden Lernen

Panel: The Future of Art and Science Collaborations

Gendered Spaces – Art and Science in Dialogue about the Production of Space

La Frontera: (Intimate) Borders in Latin America

Residency: Healthy Grounds – But for whom?

5th Global Science Film Festival 2023: Bern Edition

Spatial Narratives – Installation

Exhibition: Care-Arbeit erzählbar machen

Lunch Cinema: Weaving Threads Across Borders

Residency: GEOGRAPHY OF GHOSTS

Workshop: Creative Methods in Health Geographies

Workshop Call: Transitional Justice

Film & Geography: Work/Health/Care

Short Film Program: Reproductive Justice

Exhibition: Making Babies in Bern

5th Global Science Film Festival 2023: Zurich Edition

Exhibition: Making Babies in Berlin

Elusive Exposures Event Series

Research Studio: Mapping the Global Intimate

Video Installations around the Baths

mLAB Symposium - Other Cartographies

Partnering for Change: Link Research to Societal Challenges

EcoArtLab: Transdisciplinary Approaches to Climate Change

Theatre of Transformation Workshop: Transforming Margins

Master's Thesis: Co-production of Knowledge through Filmmaking

Call for Research-Art Collaboration: ON UN/HEALTHY GROUNDS

4th Global Science Film Festival 2021 Bern-Zurich

“Critical Sustainability Research” with the Social Learning Video Method

Conversing Alps in Times of Climate Crisis

Digital Geographies of the Global Intimate

mLAB Symposium - The Inspired Discipline

Call for Research-Art Collaboration: UN/CERTAIN CALIBRATIONS

Explorations into the World of Radical Cartographies

Climatology & Climatography of Care

Call for Research-Art Collaboration - GLOBAL IN/JUSTICE

Reproductive Geopolitics

Governing and Contesting In/Fertility in the Global Intimate

The overall aim of the proposed project is to understand how uneven access to reproductive technologies reflects the valuation of certain bodies and lives. Whose bodies are reproduced in the future depends on who has access to reproductive technologies, here understood as both low-tech and high-tech technologies affecting fertility and infertility, conception and contraception, pregnancy and pregnancy termination, and birth and infanticide. While in the past states governed fertility through health regimes, family planning programs, and eugenics, in the present, the stratified access to reproductive technologies has resulted in a new mode of reproductive governance. The research field of reproductive geopolitics we aim to develop in this project will show how access to reproductive technologies becomes geopolitical when individuals, states, international organizations, transnational corporations, and religious and nongovernmental organizations define and contest whose bodies count as desirable for reproduction and whose bodies are denied reproduction or restricted in it. We will study the geopolitical governance of fertility through three marginalized populations: asylum-seeking women in Switzerland, indigenous women in Mexico and female migrant farm workers in Spain.

The three subprojects will analyze the entanglements of international and national politics – pertaining to the fields of migration, health, and sexual and reproductive policies – with women’s intimate lives. They advance the field of feminist geopolitics by articulating a reproductive geopolitics that elucidates how the governance of reproduction values some bodies over others and in doing so guards the boundaries of the nation.

To empirically capture marginalized women’s intimate experiences of reproductive governance, this project will advance an affectual methodology consisting of different participatory and creative methods which we develop through an affectual method toolbox. The affectual methods will generate sonic, visual, cartographic, and online data that we will use to a/effectively communicate these experiences to a broader public through an online and offline documentation.

Funding

Swiss National Science Foundation

Project Timeline

2021 – 2025

Involved Researcher

Yolinliztli Pérez-Hernández