Recent developments in artificial intelligence, assisted reproductive technologies (ART), fertility clinics, egg freezing, embryo selection, reproductive data infrastructures, and emerging artificial wombs (ectogenesis) are rapidly and fundamentally transforming the conditions and processes under which reproduction is imagined, organised, and governed. These advances develop a posthuman assemblage of reproduction (following Donna Haraway’s cyborg image) where women with the intelligent systems and technologies collectively participate in reshaping reproductive embodiments, maternal agency and the experience of conception and motherhood. However, this technological empowerment exposes an unsettling paradox: while reproduction circulates across AI systems, clinicians, reproductive technologies, global care networks, and capital, motherhood’s normativity continues to dominate the ways women’s futures are imagined. Nearly five decades later, after Adrienne Rich distinguished between motherhood as an institution and motherhood as an experience, the institution remains powerfully entangled with repronormativity and Lee Edelman’s symbolic figure of “The Child”, which continues to organize social and political life around reproductive futurism. Rather than dismantling the symbolic centrality of the Child, the contemporary posthuman reproductive assemblages instead intensify the hyper-stratification of reproduction (theorised by Homanen et al.), thereby reorganising the institution of motherhood through unequal technological infrastructures shaped by class, race, geography, and differential access to reproductive care.

This seminar is particularly interested in how these tensions are represented across literature, media, film, and popular culture. How do these cultural representations either challenge or reproduce the politics of the Child? Can cultural texts imagine reproductive futures beyond reproductive normativity and heteronormativity? Rather than asking whether these posthuman reproductive assemblages are liberating or oppressive, this seminar explores a more fundamental dilemma: Do contemporary reproductive futures transform the politics of reproduction, or simply reinvent reproductive futurism? What happens to reproductive agency when reproduction itself is datafied through algorithms, reproductive technologies, and global fertility centres? Can we imagine crip, queer, childfree, or other reproductive futures beyond the normative figure of the Child? 

We encourage interdisciplinary papers addressing themes including, but not limited to:

• AI, Motherhood, and Reproductive Futures
• Posthuman Reproductive Assemblages and Maternal Agency
• Repronormativity, Reproductive Futurism, and the Politics of the Child
• Hyper-Stratification of Reproduction, Reproductive Justice and Global Inequalities
• Reproductive labour, care, and gendered politics of motherhood