Events

February 3, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall

“World’s on Fire but We’re Still Having Kids”: Reproductive Reluctance and the Future of Making Kin
Dr. Janelle Lamoreaux
University of Arizona

ABSTRACT: Amid lingering environmentalist concern about overpopulation, many governments have expressed fears about fertility rate decline. Largely viewed as a problem of social and economic stability, the question of why people are having fewer children is continuously asked. Starting from the premise that fertility rate decline is in itself not a problem, or a solution, this talk interprets the fertility feelings and practices of young adults in Southern Arizona as a kind of reproductive reluctance. Based on collaborative research with students, I discuss climate change and concern about the ecological environment as one of many factors leading young adults to question the kinds of future kin they desire. Educational systems, reproductive restrictions, health care institutions, and “hateful environments” also contribute to reproductive reluctance, extending the boundaries of fertility decision-making well beyond the individual. The talk concludes by asking how political, economic and ecological futures might be creatively reimagined through understanding reproductive reluctance among young people today.

BIOGRAPHY: Janelle Lamoreaux is Associate Professor and Associate Director at University of Arizona’s School of Anthropology. She conducts research at the intersection of medical anthropology and science and technology studies, with particular attention to gender, reproduction and the environment. Her book Infertile Environments (Duke 2023) addresses growing concern over the relationship of chemical toxins to reproductive health through an ethnographic study of epigenetic research practices in Nanjing, China. She is currently conducting research on the cryoconservation of gametes as a means of ensuring Earthly and extraterrestrial survival, as well as a collaborative study of reproductive reluctance and fertility rate decline in Southern Arizona, USA.

“The Sledgehammer and the Scalpel: Historicizing Recent US China Policy”

(Registration is CONFIDENTIAL and is only utilized for event planning purposes. Please note that initials or pseudonyms may be used for registration).

Thursday, February 6, 2025 | 5 pm CST

University of Chicago Department of Classics, 1010 East 59th Street Rm. 110 Chicago, IL 60637

Please click HERE to register and for more information!

This event is sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies

February 10, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall

The Story of Sovaldi^™: How Intellectual Property Matters In Places That Do Not
Dr. Zahra Hayat
University of British Columbia, Vancouver

ABSTRACT: Pakistan has among the world’s lowest drug prices, and almost no drug patents filed by Western multinational corporations. Despite the absence of these quintessential barriers to pharmaceutical access, it is afflicted by severe shortages of basic lifesaving and palliative drugs. Drawing from my broader research on these seeming paradoxes of access, in this talk I examine the unprecedented arrival in Pakistan of Silicon Valley-based company Gilead Sciences’ revolutionary Hepatitis C drug, Sovaldi, just a year after its U.S. launch. Priced at $84,000 per course—$1,000 per pill—in the U.S., Sovaldi was sold in Pakistan at only $2 per pill, enabling the government to establish free Hepatitis C treatment centers across the country. Complicating the common narrative of Gilead’s benevolence in bringing Sovaldi to Pakistan, I suggest that Pakistan’s insignificance in global pharmaceutical circuits was a paradoxical condition of possibility of its access to the drug. More broadly, I suggest that given the increasing prominence of biological drugs in new pharmaceutical development, understanding the relationship between intellectual property and access requires broadening our focus beyond patents to a broader rubric of ‘pharmaceutical intellectual property’, which exceeds any individual legal property form.

BIOGRAPHY: Zahra Hayat is a medical anthropologist and lawyer. She is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies (2024-2026). Her research lies at the intersection of medical anthropology and law, examining how global regimes of pharmaceutical pricing, intellectual property, and narcotics control shape access to lifesaving and palliative drugs in the Global South. Dr. Hayat received her PhD in Anthropology from UC Berkeley in 2022. She obtained her first law degree from Oxford University, followed by an LL.M. from Yale Law School. Before starting her PhD, she practiced law in the San Francisco Bay Area for five years as a mental health advocate for children in foster care, and subsequently as an intellectual property litigator. 

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Hayat’s talk.

Revolutionary Stagecraft Theater, Technology, and Politics in Modern China

Thursday, February 13, 2025 | 4 pm CST

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Tarryn Li-Min Chun’s book!

The first (5) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Please click HERE to register and for more information.  

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies. 

February 17, 2025
3:00 PM
315 Haskell Hall

Continents Apart: Disability, Thermal Inequality, and the Narrowing of Worlds
Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat
University of California, Los Angeles

ABSTRACT: For some people, climate change has quite literally made their world smaller. This talk focuses on the ways in which rising temperatures have reshaped how certain people—frequently disabled and/or experiencing chronic illness—relate to their bodies, their homes, and their worlds. Drawing on research with people who experience thermoregulatory symptoms, I argue that the narrowing of the world is both a consequence of how heat disproportionately impacts disabled people and a strategy utilized by disabled people to survive in what are increasingly hostile climates.

BIOGRAPHY: Dr. Bharat Jayram Venkat is an Associate Professor at UCLA with a joint appointment spanning the Department of Anthropology, the Department of History, and the Institute for Society & Genetics. His first book, At the Limits of Cure (Duke University Press, 2021; Bloomsbury India, 2022), is the winner of three awards: the RAI Wellcome Medal (from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the Wellcome Trust), the Edie Turner Book Prize for Ethnographic Writing (from the Society for Humanistic Anthropology), and the Joseph W. Elder Prize in the Indian Social Sciences (from the American Institute of Indian Studies). His current book project—titled Swelter: The Fate of Our Bodies in a Warming World—is about thermal inequality, the history of heat, and the plight of our bodies in a swiftly warming world riven by inequality. This book reflects on the existential and planetary crisis posed by extreme heat, but from the perspective of our bodies as they experience this crisis. Swelter will be published by Crown in the United States, and Picador in the United Kingdom. Dr. Venkat is also the founding director of the UCLA Heat Lab. His work has been funded by the American Council for Learned Societies, the Social Science Research Council, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the American Institute for Indian Studies, and most recently, by a five-year National Science Foundation (NSF) Career Award, which is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty.

Please join us for a reception on Haskell’s mezzanine immediately following Dr. Venkat’s talk.

“The Human Factor: Industrial Psychology in China, 1930s to 1990s”

Tuesday, February 18, 2025 | 5:00 pm

Joseph Regenstein Library, Room 122 1100 E. 57th St. Chicago, IL 60637

Please click HERE to register and for more information!

This event is co-sponsored with the University of Chicago Library and the Center for East Asian Studies.

Chinese Euphonics: Phonological Patterns, Phonorhetoric and Literary Artistry in Early Chinese Narrative Texts

Wednesday, February 19, 2025 | 12 pm CST

Seminary Co-op Bookstores, 5751 South Woodlawn Avenue Chicago, IL 60637

BOOK GIVEAWAY!

Score a FREE copy of Jeffrey Tharsen’s book!

The first (2) University of Chicago students (currently enrolled) who register to attend the event will receive their very own copy, compliments of the Center for East Asian Studies! Please Click HERE to register and for more information!

This event is presented in partnership with the Seminary Co-op Bookstores and sponsored by the University of Chicago Center for East Asian Studies.