ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

Listening Otherwise: Epistemic Justice and Methods of Research Participation in Histories of Reproductive Biomedicine

Session Submission Type: Organized Session

English Abstract

How might historians of reproductive biomedicine and congenital disability listen differently? This panel explores participatory methods—oral history, co-design, documentary filmmaking, and advocacy—that challenge extractive research practices and reposition those traditionally treated as "subjects" or "sources" as collaborators, knowledge-holders, and agents of historical change.

Each paper grapples with the ethical, political, personal, and intellectual stakes of such repositioning. Participatory approaches demand that researchers confront difficult questions: Who has authority to interpret contested pasts? How do we navigate the vulnerabilities of those whose bodies and experiences constitute our archives? What responsibilities persist long after research ostensibly concludes? And how might methods themselves enact—or undermine—epistemic justice?

The panel examines how remembering, testifying, and campaigning become forms of ongoing participation that extend well beyond original clinical encounters. Contributors consider how personal memory interweaves with collective narratives, how silences form around taboo experiences, and how nostalgia, trauma, and advocacy shape what can be spoken and heard. They reflect on the intersubjective dynamics of research relationships across generational, cultural, and political distance, and on the particular challenges of working alongside participants who contest dominant scientific frameworks or whose knowledge has been systematically discredited.

Drawing on case studies from Aotearoa New Zealand, Britain, Germany, and socialist Yugoslavia, the panel argues for participatory research as a form of epistemic disobedience—one that refuses neat boundaries between researcher and researched, restores complexity to marginalised voices, and insists that historical practice carries enduring ethical obligations to those whose lives it seeks to understand.

Sub Unit

• Organized Session

Chair

• Tatjana Buklijas, University of Auckland

Individual Presentations

• Learning with Patient Campaigners about an international Drug Scandal - Birgit Nemec, University of Vienna; Jesse Olszynko-Gryn, MPIWG; Mumtaz Hussain, Worcester University

• Deconstructing Yugoslav Women’s Recollections of Reproductive Regulation: Oral History, Memory, and Method - Branka Bogdan, Independent scholar

• The Participants: Remembering the Auckland Steroid Trial - Charlotte Greenhalgh, University of Waikato

Session Organizers

• Charlotte Greenhalgh, University of Waikato

• Birgit Nemec, University of Vienna