MotherNet

3rd Virtual Global Symposium on Reproduction

CALL FOR PAPERS

Worlds of Birth: Spaces, Practices, & Representations

October 16, 2026

Confirmed Keynote Speakers

Anka Dür, architect & midwife - Kim Holden, architect & doula – Claudia Brignone, Director of Il tempo d’attesa (The Waiting, 2023) – Vicky Elson, Director of Laboring Under an Illusion (2009); Elaine Epstein, Director of Arrest the Midwife (2025) – Teresa De Pascale, midwife

Send 200-word Abstract and Short Bio in English by July 15, 2026 to Giulia Po DeLisle ([email protected]) and Laura Lazzari ([email protected])

Worlds of Birth: Spaces, Practices, & Representations

This year's virtual global symposium turns to birth, looking into the spaces, practices, and representations that shape how we come into the world. After two editions dedicated to surrogacy and pregnancy loss, we now want to examine the wide range of ways in which birth has been practiced, imagined, and represented.

Birth is never just a medical event. It happens within traditions, in particular places, and under conditions shaped by history, culture, and environment. Midwives, mothers, healers, and communities have long held knowledge about how to bring a child into the world, knowledge that has been transformed, displaced, or suppressed in different times and places. At the same time, the environment in which birth takes place - the city, the village, the hospital, the birth center, home, the climate, the ecosystem - shapes what is possible for the people giving birth and the people being born.

Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following dimensions of birth:

Spaces: how hospital, homebirth, birth center, or outdoor settings, as well as the choice of furniture, lights, colors, and the presence of water or earth, can positively or negatively influence the experience of childbirth.

Practices: midwifery, home birth, traditional and Indigenous birthing knowledges, alternative and unassisted birth, and the long tension between medicalized and non-medicalized approaches.

Representations and Environments: how different cultures, geographies, and historical periods have shaped and represented what birth means, who attends it, and how it is remembered; how ecological conditions, climate crisis, environmental injustice, and the geography of access and exclusion shape reproductive experience and birth itself.

We welcome contributions on literature, film, visual art, social media, architecture, and urban studies, and from any disciplinary perspective. Interdisciplinary approaches, transnational, underrepresented, colonial, postcolonial, and decolonial perspectives are particularly encouraged.

Scholars interested in participating are invited to submit a title, a 200-word abstract, and a short biography in English by July 15 to

Giulia Po DeLisle ([email protected]) & Laura Lazzari ([email protected]).

Notifications of acceptance will be sent by August 15. Participation is free, and registration will be required to access the virtual symposium. Presentations will be in English.

This Virtual Global Symposium is organized by Dr. Giulia Po DeLisle and Dr. Laura Lazzari with the collaboration of:

The Department of World Languages and Cultures at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; The College of fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Lowell; The Medical Humanities Initiative at Georgetown University; The Sasso Corbaro Foundation for the Medical