Programme full

Friday 17 April 2015 09:00 - 10:30
ROUNDTABLE SESSIONS
Therefore this paper will explore the real and imagined dynamics of this changing relationship, reviewing Marshall's
concept of social citizenship, and critically examining the implications for changing practices of power, rights, income
distribution and family responsibilities (Bulmer & Rees, 1996).
Who Holds Human Rights? Insights from British Human Rights Jurisprudence after the 1998 Human Rights
Act
Wolfsteller, R.
(University of Glasgow)
Assuming that human rights institutions and practices discursively construct human beings as human rights holders,
this paper investigates processes of subject-formation in human rights law in the UK. It argues that sociology, with its
traditional skepticism towards the deduction of universal norms for the construction of power as legitimate, is wellequipped
for helping us to understand contingent effects and unintended consequences of the implementation of
human rights norms. In order to do so, however, sociology has to overcome its reluctance to engage in the analysis of
human rights jurisprudence, as this is a field with severe material effects on peoples' lives.
Based on the analysis of leading human rights cases decided by the House of Lords after the introduction of the
Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA), this paper argues that the HRA led indeed to an institutional strengthening of the role
of the courts in relation to the legislature, and to the consolidation of human rights subjectivity in British common law.
On the discursive level, however, human rights jurisprudence produces hierarchies of different classes of human
rights holders, and of the varying importance of certain rights. It will be demonstrated that one of the reasons for this
lies in the persistence of a nationalistic discourse in law which inhibits aspirations for the universal validity of human
rights. Therefore, this paper also aims to shed light on the reasons why human rights are contested even in so-called
Western liberal democracies such as the UK.
Science and Technology Studies 1
ROUNDTABLE 20, CONFERENCE HALL, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
Negotiating Liminality in Assisted Reproduction
Shaw, M.
(University of Edinburgh)
It has been said that medical technologies have the potential for generating uncertainties in addition to alleviating
them, creating liminal spaces of being and understanding between “healthy” and “unhealthy.” In the case of infertility,
reproductive technologies such as IVF and earlier pregnancy detection techniques are creating, and subsequently
placing women in newly defined stages of pregnancy progress. However, ten months of ethnographic fieldwork in two
Bogotano fertility clinics revealed how a woman’s personal history and her individual desire to embrace uncertain
pregnancy outcomes interact with these technologies to shape the form and extent of this liminality in highly
idiosyncratic ways.
Embryo transfers, for example, create a monitored, measured moment of potential conception, unlike spontaneous
conception. Having created and observed this using new technologies, Colombian women often take to bedrest as
they transition from a state of not pregnant to potentially pregnant, with the intention to reach the state of pregnant.
Despite changes in technology providing these women and their doctors the ability to track pregnancy progress, early
term pregnancy detection techniques produce highly ambiguous results. Thus, personal history (pervious pregnancy
complications/loss) and desire largely influence whether the woman eagerly embraces these often ambiguous
technologies to escape her liminal state and render her self either pregnant or not pregnant. A technological detected
pregnancy may be met with resistance, as women doubt the efficacy of the exam, prolonging their liminal experience.
Here the woman (not medical practice) determines the level of uncertainty of the technology and the extent of her
liminality.
'Do You Know How Many Engineers Wanted to Marry Me?'*: Gendered Construction of Engineering Culture in
Turkey
P. Kadayifci, E.
(Middle East Technical University)
BSA Annual Conference 2015 246
Glasgow Caledonian University