Reproductive Governance and Bodily Materiality explores the growing centrality and power of the medical professional and lay practices within the field of human reproduction as they entangle with political economic processes, providing examples from multiple countries.

This book presents a dialogue between scholars on different aspects of reproductive technologies. If we continue to work in disciplinary silos, reproductive studies is in danger of missing, and thereby reproducing, the kinds of power structures that shape reproductive life.

Taking a lived religion approach that draws on extensive ethnographic research on abortion debates in public spaces, Anti-Abortion Activism in the UK explores the sacred and profane commitments of anti-abortion activists and counter-demonstrations outside clinics, examining the contestations over space.

Drawing on interviews with donors, their kin and fertility counsellors, the authors discuss what donation stories can tell us about contemporary understandings of connectedness, time and morality in the context of reproduction and family life, and consider how reproductive ‘openness’ might be done differently.

What is the relationship between mind and ideas on the one hand, and the material things of the world on the other? In recent years, researchers have rejected the old debate about the primacy of the mind or material, and have sought to establish more nuanced understandings of the ways humans interact with their material worlds. In this volume alternative approaches are presented, deriving from a wide variety of theoretical perspectives. Contributors debate the significance of key thresholds in the human past, including sedentism, domestication, and the emergence of social inequality and their impact on changing patterns of human cognition, symbolic expression, and technological innovation. In its global coverage and its broad theoretical scope, this landmark volume offers an innovative and comprehensive assessment of current thinking and future directions.

As the official artists' collective representing Vienna at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 2002, the monochrom group -- Johannes Grenzfurthner, Günther Friesinger, and Daniel Fabry -- invented an artist called Georg Paul Thomann and carried off the exhibition as a very elaborate prank. The trio, aided by philosopher Thomas Ballhausen, brings that same sense of the cutting-edge and the carnivalesque to this collection exploring erotica, science fiction, and technology. A bracing mix of literary forms, the book shows why the fantasy genre is especially suited to the investigation of the transgressive realms of sexuality and pornography. Here questions of science, research, and technologization are examined, along with the complex surrounding urbanism, artificiality, and control (or the loss of control). Provocative and penetrating,Do Androids Sleep with Electric Sheep?reveals a wealth of depictions of the future and shows the many ways in which they also address the present.

This introductory college textbook is designed to help students think through the basic questions that arise in the study of religion. What is the nature of religious experience? How is religion part of our lives? How does religion shape the actions of individuals and communities? How does religion promote or inhibit human development and well-being? Developed and tested through team teaching and refined and revised through classroom use, Introduction to the Study of Religion brings together the expertise of five professors with distinct specialties. They draw on examples from a variety of world religions to explore these questions. Easily accessible to undergraduates, the text assumes little basic knowledge of religious traditions or history.