̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Sarah Franklin

Sandi Toksvig OBE takes up the first Q+ Fellowship at Cambridge

jek67 — Fri, 06 Oct 2023 06:47:58 +0000

Sandi Toksvig, the award-winning author, broadcaster, entertainer and founder of the Women’s Equality Party, has been awarded the inaugural Qantabrigian Fellowship for 2023-24, by the LGBTQ+ research programme in Cambridge ̽��ֱ��’s Department of Sociology.

̽��ֱ��Q+ Fellowship enables distinguished Cambridge LGBTQ+ alumni to spend time at the ̽��ֱ�� to conduct a research project or incubate a new idea. ̽��ֱ��goal of the Fellowship is to build stronger links to the distinguished worldwide community of LGBTQ+ Cambridge alumni and to widen participation in the research and teaching activities of the ̽��ֱ��.

As part of her Fellowship, Sandi will be pausing her theatre and broadcasting work for the Michaelmas term to develop a new Mappa Mundi project, with the aim of creating a digital resource documenting women’s position, achievements and struggles across the globe.

Sandi has also been elected to a Bye-Fellowship at Christ’s College, Cambridge for the 2023-2024 academic year and will convene a series of events, workshops and meetings to develop her initiative in partnership with Cambridge academic staff, students and support services.

Sandi Toksvig says: “I’m delighted to be returning to my old stomping ground of Cambridge to lead such an innovative project. This new Mappa Mundi project will be a three-dimensional, interactive view of the globe from a female perspective, with the goal of changing the world by learning to see it differently. It will be story-led, data driven and allow women from all countries to present their stories, their hardships, and their triumphs.”

Q+ founding Director Professor Sarah Franklin says: “ ̽��ֱ��Q+ Fellowship is dedicated to recognising the many extraordinary achievements of Cambridge’s LGBTQ+ alumni over many centuries and across the globe. It also aims to show that building partnerships through research engaging ever more inclusive audiences is an important way we can fulfil the ̽��ֱ��’s core mission. I cannot think of a more inspiring individual to launch both these exciting new initiatives than the brilliant Sandi Toksvig.”

Simon, Lord McDonald of Salford, Master of Christ’s College says: “Sandi Toksvig’s Q+ Fellowship comes at a vital time for both the College and the ̽��ֱ�� communities as we continue to redefine learning, education and knowledge in the digital age. Thinking creatively about how we build publicly-engaged and inclusive college communities is essential to the delivery of world-leading teaching and research, as well as excellence in education and scholarship.”

̽��ֱ��new initiative from the Department of Sociology enables LGBTQ+ alumni to return to Cambridge to pursue research projects.

"This new Mappa Mundi project will be story-led, data driven and allow women from all countries to present their stories."

Sandi Toksvig

Photographer: Graham CopeKoga

Sandi Toksvig, pictured at Christ's College, Cambridge

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Images, including our videos, are Copyright © ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and licensors/contributors as identified. All rights reserved. We make our image and video content available in a number of ways – as here, on our main website under its Terms and conditions, and on a range of channels including social media that permit your use and sharing of our content under their respective Terms.

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Cambridge astronomer tops list of Royal Society Medal and Award winners

hcf38 — Wed, 30 Aug 2023 07:00:00 +0000

Lord Rees, a Fellow of Trinity College and Emeritus Professor of Cosmology and Astrophysics at the ̽��ֱ��, has been awarded the Royal Society’s Copley Medal for sustained, outstanding achievements in any field of science. First awarded in 1731, previous recipients of the medal have included Louis Pasteur, Dorothy Hodgkin, Albert Einstein, and Charles Darwin.

A Fellow and former President of the Royal Society, and the UK’s current Astronomer Royal, Lord Rees is one of the most distinguished theoretical astrophysicists of his generation and was chosen for his many and varied conceptual breakthroughs over several decades, with influence spreading far beyond the specialist academic community.

Accepting the Medal, Lord Rees, who has authored or co-authored more than 500 research papers and 11 books, said: “It is of course deeply gratifying to have my lifetime efforts recognised by award of the Copley medal.

“I've been especially fortunate to have injected fruitful ideas into the interpretation of new data in several areas of astronomy, and to have collaborated with many colleagues at different phases of my career.”

Also receiving Royal Society Medals and Awards this year are Cambridge Professors Sarah Franklin and Erwin Reisner.

Professor Franklin is awarded the Wilkins-Bernal-Medawar Medal and Lecture for her research into, and advocacy for, the social aspects of new reproductive technologies, while Professor Reisner is awarded the Hughes Medal for pioneering new concepts and solar technologies for the production of sustainable fuels and chemicals from carbon dioxide, biomass and plastic waste.

Renowned Cambridge astrophysicist and cosmologist Professor Lord Martin Rees has been named this year’s recipient of the world’s oldest and most prestigious scientific award.

Lord Martin Rees

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Tales from the edge of modern fertilities

fpjl2 — Tue, 15 Dec 2020 14:21:15 +0000

A major research project sees sociologists situated at emerging hot spots of reproductive change, investigating the new ‘haves and have-nots’ in our fertility futures.

"Reproduction matters to us all": latest issue of Horizons magazine

lw355 — Fri, 20 Nov 2020 11:26:45 +0000

Professor Kathy Niakan talks about why it’s vital to take a multidisciplined approach to understanding the urgent challenges posed by reproduction today – and introduces our Spotlight on some of this work, highlighted in the latest issue of Cambridge's Horizons magazine.

Out at Cambridge

fpjl2 — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 09:33:30 +0000

New report on LGBTQ+ experiences at the ̽��ֱ�� is now published. While many feel Cambridge offers a “safe and empowering” community, the report highlights the “emotional labour” of being LGBTQ+ at a leading academic institution.

Where the river meets the sea: the making of ethical decisions

amb206 — Wed, 10 Aug 2016 07:00:00 +0000

Mid-way through her book, Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction, Dr Katharine Dow describes walking on a Scottish beach and seeing, for the first time, a minke whale in the wild. It’s a grey day and all she can see is its fin dark against the waves – yet the sighting marks a turning point. Her exhilaration helps her to connect with the members of the wildlife project she is shortly to join as a volunteer.

She writes: “I began to see for myself what the fuss was about, how some people can end up devoting their lives to saving cetaceans.” But, as highly articulate as she is, she finds it hard to express in words the potency of her feelings about the whale out there in the ocean. “Something about seeing one in the wild, so close to where people were going about their ordinary business, was so strange as to seem magical.”

Dow is a social anthropologist and a research associate in the Reproductive Sociology Research Group. She has a particular interest in assisted reproductive technologies (ART), a field of medicine that is subject to fierce debate on the grounds of the ethics of “tampering with nature”. Academic research into the ramifications of ART has concentrated on those who are directly involved as active participants (for example, would-be parents undergoing treatment or children conceived via sperm donation).

Much less research has taken place into the views of the millions of people not directly involved in ART but, nevertheless, have opinions about scientific advances that, for example, enable a post-menopausal woman to conceive and carry a child. Making a Good Life helps to fill this gap by documenting in detail the views and opinions of a small community in Spey Bay, a coastal village in north-east Scotland.

̽��ֱ��community that Dow joined for 20 months in order to carry out her research is a very particular one: it comprises a small number of professionals and volunteers working for a charity dedicated to safeguarding the local environment for wildlife. Spey Bay is a Site of Special Scientific Interest and an important habitat for cetaceans, most notably a 100-strong population of bottlenose dolphins.

̽��ֱ��‘good life’ in Dow’s title is a key to understanding this small community: members of the centre have chosen to make a contribution to the environment, feel passionately about the safeguarding of vulnerable species, and try to live ‘ethically’ by making careful lifestyle choices. How these people think about ART – and surrounding questions about bringing children into the world – is shaped by their wider feelings, and interactions with, the environment.

Making a Good Life blends Dow’s account of life in a tight-knit community with details of in-depth conversations with her co-workers and others about matters of reproduction, a topic that touches on their personal experiences of being, or thinking about, parenthood. She also brings into the mix an analysis of the ethical issues under discussion, the legislation controlling ART, and work by academic colleagues on questions of kinship and belonging.

As she weaves these strands together, Dow reminds us that we don’t think about, and form opinions about, some of life’s most important questions in watertight thought compartments: how we think about ART is coloured by our wider thoughts about nature – and how our lives fit into, or stand apart from, the environment. How we feel about issues of reproduction is all about the many contexts – including the families we are part of or separated from – within which we imagine our lives.

̽��ֱ��idea of family bonds, particularly the fierce tie between a mother and her young, is something that runs deep in our picture of nature, especially so in the case of iconic species. When a minke whale calf swam into a nearby fishing harbour and was unable to find its way out, it drew crowds of concerned tourists. An adult minke spotted outside the harbour was immediately assumed to be its anxious mother.

Dow writes: “ ̽��ֱ��distant figure of the calf’s putative mother waiting in the firth, apparently unable to help it back from its reckless path into the harbour, added a particular poignancy to this stranding story. People assumed that the calf would be all the more distressed because of its separation from its ‘mother’ and that reuniting them would be the best, and perhaps only, way to ensure its survival.”

While Dow’s interviewees welcome many of the techniques that help people to fulfil their desire to have a child, they are worried by the ‘unnaturalness’ of surrogacy, an arrangement by which a woman carries a child on behalf of someone else. In unpacking the process of surrogacy, she identifies the “postpartum handover of the child”, from surrogate mother to intended parent or parents, as the defining act of this agreement. “Surrogacy is troubling because the surrogate is expected to resist a natural feeling that is supposed to be so strong that refuting it would be emotionally damaging,” she writes with reference to the views expressed by her interviewees.

“ ̽��ֱ��ethical dilemmas provoked by surrogacy demonstrate that motherhood is heavily laden with moral values that inscribe expectations for proper behaviour and relationships and that are articulated in the language of nature, biology and embodied feeling. Any challenge to maternal bonding, like the relinquishing of a child by a surrogate mother, seems to represent a threat to our most basic relationship and source of identity.”

In discussing questions of belonging, Dow shares aspects of her own story. Her father discovered in his mid-40s that he’d been adopted. A half-sister appears in his life and then two more. All had been adopted by different couples, who may not have been informed that their adoptive children had siblings. Dow’s father learns that his mother died giving birth to twins, unattended in a Dundee flat. Mother and twins were found dead, a tragedy that left many unanswered questions.

Events local to Spey Bay, and responses to them as they unfold, punctuate Dow’s narrative. Her book opens with the death of a sperm whale. Its carcass is washed up on the beach a 40-minute drive from the wildlife centre and people congregate to see it. Talking later, the leader of the centre describes the atmosphere as “reverential”. Onlookers are shocked to see that its lower jaw has been hacked off; there is a global black market trade in whale teeth. Whales are protected by law and a criminal investigation is launched.

Reverence and outrage are complex emotions unique to humans – as is a sense of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. “Ethics is profoundly emotional … ̽��ֱ��public ethics of ART has commonly centred on visceral reactions and often it is difficult for people to explain why something is unethical except to say that it simply seems wrong … Listening to feelings and recognising when we have transgressed 'feeling rules' can be a way of mapping the ethical terrain,” writes Dow.

“One of the best ways of getting at ethics, of following its fluid flow as it is made and reproduced is talking. Data, in ethnographic fieldwork, are not latent in our interlocutors, waiting to be unearthed by the researcher; they come from the space between the ethnographer and the participant. To use an environmentalist metaphor, gathering data is not about extracting a commodity, but responsibly harnessing a renewable resource by redirecting its flow.”

Spey Bay is a place “where the river meets the sea”, the title of a poem by the poet John Mackie, whom Dow meets in the course of researching her book. This merging of the waters neatly echoes Dow’s own breaking of boundaries between gender studies, anthropology and travelogue. She shows us how free-flowing and ultimately elusive our ideas of the world really are.

Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction is published by Princeton ̽��ֱ�� Press. Dr Katharine Dow is a research associate with the Reproductive Sociology Research Group. ̽��ֱ��group supports research and teaching on the social and cultural implications of new reproductive technologies. It is led by Professor Sarah Franklin.

What is our place in the natural world – and how do we feel about the scientific advances that are changing the way we live? In her book Making a Good Life, Dr Katharine Dow explores the ethics of assisted reproductive technology in conversations with members of a small Scottish community dedicated to protecting the environment.

̽��ֱ��ethical dilemmas provoked by surrogacy demonstrate that motherhood is heavily laden with moral values that inscribe expectations for proper behaviour and relationships and that are articulated in the language of nature, biology and embodied feeling.

Katharine Dow

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Bottlenose dolphins in the Moray Firth. Scotland

̽��ֱ��text in this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. For image use please see separate credits above.

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