Professor Sarah Franklin

Positions
University Professor of Sociology
Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator
Director: Reproductive Sociology Research Group
Fellow at Christ's College
Chair: Anne McLaren Trust

Department/College
Sociology
Christ's College

About
Franklin has helped to establish several new fields in the social sciences including the 'new kinship studies', the social study of new reproductive technologies, and the cultural analysis of bioscience, biomedicine and biotechnology. She has had research funding from numerous bodies including the Wellcome Trust, ERC, ESRC, MRC, British Academy, Philomathia Foundation, Wenner Gren Foundation, Carnegie Foundation and Mellon Foundation, among others. Franklin's current research concerns the early history of UK IVF and she has worked closely with colleagues in the history of science as well as reproductive biology to develop new interdisciplinary approaches to the study of the intersection between reproduction and technology. Through her work on IVF, Franklin has developed new theories of both biology and technology, focussing on the use of biological tools, and the relativization of the category 'biological'. This model, of biological relativity, is the subject of her most recent book and builds on her previous introduction of the terms 'transbiology', 'embodied progress', and 'hope technologies'.

Teaching
SOC4: Concepts and arguments in Sociology
SOC6: Advanced social theory
SOC10: Gender

Sociology of Gender, Reproduction and Kinship, Science and Technology Studies, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Bioscience.