Suchergebnisse

Reproductive technologies involving donated eggs or sperm continue to elicit questions regarding family identity and the accessibility of genetic information in Europe. Both policy-makers and affected parents are faced with decisions about how to manage donor-data. Using ethnographic findings and policy analysis, this article compares modes of regulation in Germany and Britain, which variously authorise actors to manage kinship information and family formation. I consider the role of interest groups for affected parents and analyse how they contribute to a moral framing of the decision – if, when and how to tell a child about the donor. This 'moralisation', reflecting wider contemporary endorsement of information sharing within family life, tends to encourage early disclosure practices among so-called families-by-donation. German parents expressed greater anxiety about disclosure than British parents, which I attribute to greater regulatory uncertainty and to tensions between clinical pressures of secrecy and the moral pressure for information sharing.

From the 1970s onwards, reproductive medicine made available interventions and treatments that were readily taken up by an increasing number of people "to make kin" in western and "non-western" societies alike. Instead of an unfortunate fate or social problem unwanted childlessness today is seen as a pathological condition that requires medical attention. While there is broad consensus that reproductive medicine is beneficial in principle, new techniques (like pre-implantation diagnosis) regularly trigger heated controversies at the time of their implementation: in public discourses, in legal, political or medical debates as well as in perceptions of patients. Reproductive interventions are perceived as challenging "normal" conception, as disrupting "natural" ontologies, and as questioning ethical consensus. Drawing on ethnographic data from Turkey and Germany, the article comparatively analyzes how different actors respond to these challenges. Using the method of "extended cases" we inquire from a processual perspective how patients use and experience reproductive medicine, how they create "assisted reproductive biographies"; we ask what kinship practices they develop and how they seek support of patient organisations; and we analyze how they modify body images, acquire medical knowledge, reconfigure intimate practices, create new relations and moral obligations. On the basis of these observations the article sets out to theoretically frame normalization practices on an individual, familial, institutional and discursive level.

The concept of knowledge society has been invented by the social sciences in order to describe perspectives of modern societies. Nowadays the concept circulates increasingly in the political, educational, and economic field and in the media and has already crossed-over the geographical boundaries to which it had been applied first. Taking knowledge society as a representation serving to interpret and shape social practices, the paper outlines from an interdisciplinary perspective academic debates on the concepts and on notions of knowledge. The paper argues that certain paradigms of social progress and of science as inherent in knowledge society prevent « users » of the concept from considering contesting notions of knowledge, increasing forms of incoherent knowledge, and the accelerating devaluation of knowledge.

The concept of knowledge society has been invented by the social sciences in order to describe perspectives of modern societies. Nowadays the concept circulates increasingly in the political, educational, and economical field and in the media and has already crossed-over the geographical boundaries to which it had been applied first. Taking knowledge society as a representation serving to interpret and shape social practice, the paper outlines from an interdisciplinary perspective academic debates on the concepts and on notions of knowledge. The paper argues that certain paradigms of social progress and of science as inherent in knowledge society prevent "users" of the concept from considering contesting notions of knowledge, increasing forms of incoherent knowledge, and the accelerating devaluation of knowledge.