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This edited collection proposes an interdisciplinary and integrated approach to the study of reproductive technologies (RTs), which reflects the fact that many people use different technologies throughout their lifecourse and resists the disciplinary siloing of research on these technologies. The ever-expanding availability of RTs, the continued roll-out of ‘family planning’ and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and trans* people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users' expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies' availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We offer this book as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and RTs, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of RTs and the ways in which they are studied and theorised. Here, we introduce the project and outline the structure of the book.

Menopause discourse plays a powerful cultural role in the west, serving to mark a (negative) shift in women's social status, shaping both social norms and women's self-appraisals and dividing women's lifecourse into two: fertile and post-fertile, with value attributed only to the former. However, in 2019 a new ‘solution’ to the problem of menopause entered public discourse in the form of a new surgical technology, offered by the private health provider ProFam, to delay menopause via ovarian freezing techniques. Aimed in the first instance at women seeking to avoid the disruptions of severe symptoms, it also quickly became framed as a way in which (especially childless) women might extend their fertility. In this chapter I explore menopause discourse as it appears in medical and popular sources associated with this new technology, looking at the continuities and discontinuities with earlier forms of menopause discourse. I also take a broader view in placing technologies for delaying menopause in the context of reproductive technologies used by women at all stages of the lifecourse, critically examining the claims that they give women choice, freedom and control over time. I suggest that in fact they are implicated with rather more complex temporal structures, captured in the concept of ‘ambivalence’ and characterised by a mixture of gendered expectation, anticipation and suspension of agency. Finally, I explore whether it is menopause itself, rather than its delay, that, in serving to disrupt such temporal ambivalence among other things, can in fact introduce the possibility of freedom.

This chapter investigates knowledge and practices relating to the ‘right timing’ in reproductive biomedicine in Switzerland. More precisely, it focuses on the effects of an anticipatory regime (Adams, Murphy, & Clarke, 2009) on women's experiences of age-related infertility. As assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) promise to intervene in the fixed ‘biological facts’ of fertility decline to render reproduction and the timing of motherhood more flexible, manageable and controllable, this chapter explores the effects of anticipation on women's experiences and negotiations of age-related infertility and ARTs. It sheds light on an anticipatory regime which can be called ‘motherhood as right timing’. It shows how, in this regime, the temporality of the lifecourse is brought back to a biological temporality and how expectations and injunctions towards managing and controlling time contain the possibility of their failure, as they are associated with a multiplication of uncertain, complex and resisting biologies. At the core of the practices and politics of anticipating fertility decline, there is a tension between acting upon and being acted upon time, which are embedded in a moral economy of responsibility and volition in which women are blamed, or blame themselves, for not anticipating what is by definition beyond individual control and anticipation.

Much research to date on professional transitions has focused on predicting them and then preparing individual practitioners to navigate transitions as sites of struggle. The purpose of this paper is to critically examine, within the context of professional practice and learning, diverse theoretical approaches that are currently prominent in researching transitions and to propose future directions for research.

The paper begins by describing work contexts integral with professional transitions: regulation, governance and accountability; new work structures; and knowledge development. The discussion then examines transitions research in developmental psychology, lifecourse sociology, and career studies. These perspectives are compared critically in terms of questions and approaches, contributions to understanding professional transitions, and limitations.

The implications for educators are a series of critical questions about research and education directed to support transitions in professional learning and work. Future directions and questions for research in professional transitions are suggested in the final section, along with implications for supporting professional learning in these transitions.

The paper is not intended to be comprehensive, but to identify issues for the reader's consideration in thinking about various forms of transition being experienced by professions and professionals. The discussion is theory‐based, exploratory, and indicative, rather than definitive.

This chapter critiques the relationality between care and context to demonstrate how notions of routinised technologies are disrupted when considering the reproductive realities and situated constraints of ethnic and religious minority women. The chapter integrates ethnographic and qualitative data from two minority contexts, including maternity care provision for Orthodox Jews and how providers approach requests for sex-selective abortion (SSA) when caring for women from South Asian backgrounds. By examining responses to caesarean sections and abortion care among ethnic and religious minorities in the United Kingdom, the chapter critiques how routinised interventions are entangled in the anticipation of future reproductive potential. The idea of anticipatory futures serves as a reflection on the reproductive lifecourse, where technologies carry opportunities and implications that women and carers alike are tasked with negotiating. Taking inspiration from the reproductive justice framework, the chapter builds on a body of work that demonstrates how the concept of ‘choice’ is contingent and not inclusive of the situated constraints that can affect the reproductive lives of women from minority backgrounds. By delving into everyday reproductive constraints, the chapter raises implications for what inclusive woman-centred (or person-centred) care can involve, how providers approach ‘choice’, autonomy and justice in practice, and how their considerations reconfigure the otherwise ‘routine’ delivery of reproductive health services and technologies. Technologies increasingly invest the reproductive lifecourse with potential and anticipation, and the chapter calls on feminist scholars to understand the dilemmas posed for inclusive models of care beyond the discourse of ‘choice’.

This paper aims to call the public health and mental health communities to action by making women’s mental health a public health priority.

This conceptual paper introduces a “Female Psychology” approach to framing and interpreting mental health narratives and public health discourses. It also draws upon lifecourse research as a way of better understanding mental illness.

This paper calls for action to prioritise women’s mental health on the public health agenda like has never previously been done before.

New theoretical bases for research and practice are presented, encouraging the adoption of a “Female Psychology” approach to women’s lifecourses and mental health narratives.

Suggestions for changes to how we view, diagnose and treat women’s mental health are incorporated, ensuring women’s mental health narratives are placed firmly at the centre of their care and support.

Women’s mental health has long been marginalised and dismissed as exaggerated and/or insignificant, and therefore has not had the economic-, personnel- and time-resource allocated to it, which it so desperately requires. This paper aims to tip the imbalance.

This paper, though conceptual, offers “Female Psychology” as both a practical and pragmatic approach to improving women’s mental health research, practice, and care. It is the first of its kind to, so directly, call the public health and mental health communities to prioritise women’s mental health.

Existing research tends to conceptualize age- and gender-based discrimination as distinct and unrelated social phenomena. A growing body of scholarship, however, highlights the importance of conceptualizing ageism as potentially gendered, and gender discrimination as inherently shaped by age. Using an intersectional theoretical perspective, this chapter examines how gender and age combine to shape women’s and men’s experiences of workplace mistreatment.

The data are obtained from the U.S. General Social Survey. The analysis begins with descriptive statistics, showing how rates of perceived age and gender mistreatment vary for men and women of different age groups. Multivariate logistic regressions follow.

Experiences of workplace mistreatment are significantly shaped by both gender and age. Among both men and women, workers in their 30s and 40s report relatively low levels of perceived age-based discrimination, compared to older or younger workers. It is precisely during this interval of relatively low rates of perceived age-based discrimination that women’s (but not men’s) perceptions of gender-based mistreatment rises dramatically. At all ages, women are significantly more likely to face either gender- or age-based discrimination than men, but the gap is especially large among workers in their 40s.

Women tend to perceive age- and gender-based mistreatment at different times of life, but a concurrent examination of gender- and age-based mistreatment reveals that women’s working lives are characterized by high rates of mistreatment throughout their careers, in a way that men’s are not. The results highlight the importance of conceptualizing gender and age as intersecting systems of inequality.

This chapter discusses an instance of spectacular reproduction that circulated in US media during the late 2010s. Through the use of commercial DNA tests, it was revealed that a fertility doctor, Donald Cline, had used his own sperm to impregnate scores of women who had sought fertility treatment from him during the 1980s. More than 60 biogenetic children, now in their mid to late 30s, were identified by early 2020. This instance illustrates several concepts and concerns that might further guide the social and cultural study of human reproduction and especially the uses of reproductive technologies: (1) Most of us encounter instances of extraordinary reproduction from a mediated distance, yet they may shape and inform our expectations and experiences of ordinary reproduction in our everyday lives. How might the concept of spectacle help us understand what is perceived and understood about reproductive technologies? (2) Reproductive technologies offer ‘fixes’ for disruptions of not only reproduction but also kinship. A focus of this chapter is on genetic genealogy tests as a re(tro)productive technology, which produces children, parents, and kinship in hindsight. (3) The social and cultural study of reproductive technologies ought to take a longitudinal approach that both includes a lifecourse perspective and takes into account the historical contexts in which the technologies become developed and individuals encounter them.

The study of family mobilities necessitates an examination of how practices are orchestrated in time as well as space. Conventional approaches to the study of family time use either quantitative analysis of time-use data or qualitative studies of time pressure and work/life balance. The limitation with these approaches is that they assume a rather static family structure that is dominated by parents with young children. Moreover, these studies do not capture the dualistic quality of time; that time constitutes and is a constituent of family life. In this chapter, I use one-day diaries on organising and experiencing time, collated as part of the UK Mass Observation Project in Autumn 2017, to interrogate the relationality of family time. The analysis examines how family practices maybe sequential, synchronous, planned or serendipitous and how these different temporalities permeate the busyness of time pressure. These one-day accounts confirm how time is experienced through and by family and intimate relationships.