Krähenbühl Mathilde

Giving birth or not ? : Reproduction, environmental concerns and futures. A multi-situated ethnography of eco-reproductive concerns. 

Sous la direction de Irene Maffi, Université de Lausanne

The interdependence between human reproduction and ecological concerns has resurfaced in the past decade under the form of ‘eco-reproductive’ concerns. The public debate has significantly centred around childlessness and the eco-Malthusian inspired ‘carbon footprint’ narrative. However, individual and collective accounts also exemplify concerns over uncertain futures, recalling reproductive justice movements’ claims to secure stable and healthy environments. In a context where contradictory injunctions to procreation are at play, such concerns also highlight aspirations toward alternative kinship and conceptions of ‘family’. Through ethnographic fieldwork in Switzerland and France with ‘neorural’ communities, urban activists, parents and non-parents, this research explores how lived environmentalism (re)shapes reproductive paths, what futures are imagined, and what arrangements people build to have children when the context is considered unappropriated. Finally, the analysis of ‘eco-reproductive’ concerns is built upon and aims to generate theoretical discussions in the anthropology of reproduction, the literature interested in the reproduction-environment relationship, and the anthropology of the future.