Donor Conception Materialities

Themes: healthcare design, object relations, post-phenomenology, medical museology, intangible materiality, public science communication, assisted reproductive technology (ART), reproductive justice, futurity

Over 70,000 people were born via registered donor conception (the use of donated sperm, eggs and/or embryos to conceive children) in Britain between 1991 and 2019 – a figure now estimated to be closer to 100,000. This is a hidden but growing patient body, and a rapidly expanding sociomedical practice, the impacts of which reach far beyond the individual treatment cycle – not only to donor-conceived people’s own experiences across the life course, but also to varying cultural understandings of family formation, wider bioethical debates, and reproductive justice campaigning. 

This project seeks to transform understandings of complex patient experiences of the practice of donor conception. My contention is that the affective experiences of individuals and families using donor conception are shaped not only by social, ethical and legal factors, but also by material and sensory experiences of treatment. I will be exploring how these experiences evoke or reflect people’s emotional relationships with symbolic ‘internal objects’ (mentalised conceptions of the donor/s, their genetic material, and clinical objects) within a clinical setting that is often positioned as a way to sanitise and ‘contain’ such factors. 

My research design centres the varied uses and affordances of the material object within the ‘assemblages’ of clinical and domestic treatment settings – from clinics’ scanning rooms and operating theatres to patients’ bathrooms, used for daily tracking and injections. The project thus seeks to provide both an evidence base for, and a theoretical account of, what Charis Thompson (2007) has called the ‘ontological choreography of reproductive technologies’. There are also rich potential overlaps with emerging work on ‘sociotechnological imaginaries’ and the ‘biomolecular humanities’. 

I will be working with patients, clinicians and product designers to understand how people experience material objects and spaces from the design stage through to treatment. The project will use qualitative interviews, museum collections work in the UK and Denmark, participant-led creative collaborations (including object handling, creative work, and an online exhibition) and critical analysis rooted in psychoanalytic object relations theory and post-phenomenology. 

This work includes a strong focus on the potential for medical museology practice to increase public awareness of the material experiences of donor conception, providing a ‘resonant physical space for affective encounters’ (Star Rogers et al., 2023) rooted in theorisations of object relations in the museum. The project also aims to play a role in the sector-wide push for necessary improvement of patients’ experiences of donor conception treatment. 

I am always interested in hearing from potential partners, so please do get in touch if any of this resonates with your or your organisation’s own work and interests.