Gestation: Justice - Ms Nompumelelo Gumede

As part of the IAS Annual Theme for 2023-2024 'Gestation: Bodies, Technologies, Ecologies, Justice', IAS Visiting Fellow Ms Nompumelelo Gumede devliers their thoughts on the topic. Gestation is an incontrovertibly universal yet deeply varied experience, with complex concerns arising recently through the rollback of women’s rights, gestational inequalities and neo-natal trajectories, imbrication in neo-fascist discourse and novel methods for reproduction, kinship and care. It is a complex negotiation of culture, technology, biology and politics constituted relationally through entanglements of human and non-human agents and practices that extend beyond the flesh. Gestation forms an inherently interdisciplinary field, spanning sport, health and medicine, social sciences, politics and law, history, geography, design, arts and culture, with reverberations in (micro)biology and genetics, robotics and AI, post- and transhumanism, disability studies, critical race and queer and trans theory. This roundtable focuses on 'Justice' as a site of gestational realities, bringing together an exceptional group of international scholars to share their wide-ranging disciplinary perspectives on the Theme. For more information about the IAS, please visit - https://www.lboro.ac.uk/research/ias