Department of Gender Studies Lecture Series: Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices
“Human Reproduction and Beyond: Embryos, Genes, and Tissues on Trial”
Public lecture by Judit Sándor
Advances in assisted reproduction, genetic testing, embryonic stem cell research, synthetic biology, and other fields in contemporary biotechnology have generated considerable attention among legal scholars as many contested cases in relation to them have already reached the courts. Legal interest in these scientific developments emerges also because they challenge our taken-for-granted understanding of the relationship between the body and mind, between natural and artificial, or between private and public domains. The presentation will analyze some of the recent legal debates, and will make an attempt to explore the current legal frontiers of the technology of assisted reproduction.
Judit Sándor is a professor at the Departments of Political Science, Legal Studies, and Gender Studies of the Central European University (CEU), Budapest. She had a bar exam and conducted a legal practice at Simmons & Simmons in London, and then had fellowships at McGill University in Montreal, Stanford University in Palo Alto, the University of Chicago and Maison de sciences de l’homme in Paris. In 1996 she received her Ph.D. in law and political science. She served in several prestigious Hungarian and international advisory and ethics committees, and worked as Chief of the Bioethics Section at UNESCO in Paris. She published seven books in the field of human rights and biomedical law. Her book chapters and journal articles appeared in numerous languages, including English, Hungarian, French, and Portuguese. She is a founding director of the Center for Ethics and Law in Biomedicine (CELAB) at the Central European University. Her major research fields include the social, ethical, and legal implications of assisted reproduction, genetics, and biobanks, and the policy aspects of new technologies in the life sciences.
The Voicing Genders, Engendering Voices lecture series is a joint celebration of the Department’s 15th anniversary and the 20th anniversary of CEU. The lecture series shares our diverse faculty’s most recent research with the wider academic community and showcases the multiple and interdisciplinary ways in which our field contributes to the themes of CEU’s university-wide celebrations: disciplinary self-reflexivity and academia’s social responsibility. Thus our lecture series is intended to contribute to the larger intellectual debates initiated in celebration of CEU’s 20th anniversary.