Openness about gamete (i.e. sperm or egg) donation and the regulation of donor-anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about the donors and the donation in Germany and Britain? And how does this ‘knowledge-management’ contribute to the making and doing of kinship? Addressing these questions through an ethnographic exploration, this book makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change in plural late-modern societies in Europe. The research demonstrates a contemporary re-negotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness – with transparency as moral imperative, not genetics. Instead of an unambiguously discernible ‘geneticisation’ the findings on donor-non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of ‘transparentization’. In ensemble a shift of authority becomes evident, more minute in Germany than in Britain, towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policy-makers, away from a sometimes high handed reproductive medical profession.
In the thirty-five years since the first +test-tube baby,[&½] in-vitro fertilization and other methods of reproductive assistance have become a common aspect of family life and medicine in affluent nations and, increasingly, throughout the world. How do persons seeking treatment, donors, and medical experts make use of these reproductive technologies? How in crossing borders between nations do they manage to evade legal and bioethical regulations? And how do they make sense of these new modes of making kinship against the backdrop of diverse world-views and social settings? --
Openness about sperm and egg donation and the regulation of donor anonymity or non-anonymity are new phenomena. How do affected families, clinics, and regulators deal with information about gamete donors and the donation itself? And how does this knowledge management contribute to the creation and enactment of kinship? Addressing these questions in Germany and Britain, this ethnography makes a comparative contribution to the empirical and theoretical analysis of kin-formation and social change. Maren Klotz reveals a contemporary renegotiation of the values of privacy, information-sharing, and connectedness as they relate to the social, clinical, and regulatory management of kinship information. Transparency, not genetics, is the moral imperative, and instead of an unambiguously discernible "geneticization," her findings on donor non-anonymity and parental openness display a pattern of "transparentization." This pattern represents a shift in authority over kinship away from the sometimes highhanded reproductive medical profession towards concerned groups, parents-by-donation, and policymakers. Bekommt ein Paar ein Kind mithilfe von gespendeten Ei- und Samenzellen, stellt sich die Frage, wie diese Familie mit dem Wissen um die Spende im Alltag umgeht. Maren Klotz untersucht, wie Verwandtschaft vor diesem Hintergrund konstruiert wird. Sie zeichnet ein Bild von Familiengründung im 21. Jahrhundert, das weniger von einer Relevanz genetischen Wissens geprägt ist, als vielmehr von Transparenz und Informationsfreiheit als neuem moralischem Gebot. Ausgezeichnet mit dem Humboldt-Preis 2013 der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
This book provides a practice-based analysis of European Union (EU) diplomacy and community-building. Unlike studies focusing on how EU community-building proceeds centrally in Brussels, this book turns to EU diplomacy in its bordering state of Ukraine. At a time when the EU’s internal cohesion is being put to the test, this book provides novel insights into how feelings of belonging are produced amongst its members in the absence of a homogenous ‘we’. Transcending the traditional dichotomy between macro-structures and micro-processes of interaction, the book demonstrates that the EU’s large-scale community depends for its existence on practical instantiations of community-building in distinct ‘communities of practice’. Using the case of an EU diplomatic ‘community of practice’ in Kyiv, Ukraine, takes these questions to the EU’s margins, highlighting that the boundaries of community are key sites in which community materialises. The in-depth case study identifies diplomats’ ‘boundary work’ as the constitutive rule that makes the local ‘community of practice’ cohere and create feelings of belonging to the large-scale polity of the EU. This book will be of interest to researchers of European studies, as well as to those working on global cooperation and international relations more broadly.
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