Soziale und psychische Implikationen humanmedizinischer Reproduktionstechnologien. Eine Projektdokumentation (Band 1 und 2, 2023) – Arno Bammé (Hg.)

The society of the future will be shaped by technology. We are all part of a gigantic experiment that will restructure human identity as it deals with its environment. Next to information and communication technologies, gene and reproductive technologies will play a central role: they all work actively at answering the question of what a human being is.

The two volumes of the project summary introduce the status quo of the discussion regarding social and psychological effects of human gene and reproductive technologies towards the end of the twentieth century, with particular emphasis on the fact that we are not only dealing with scientific somatic questions but also with socially and psychologically manifest topics. The volumes present the results of a three-year research project.

The project is distinguished by many particular features. First of all, it is an exclusive women’s project, designed and realised in the spirit of a deliberate feminist perspective: “female medicine” – no longer orienting itself on the theoretical abstract “human”, empirically veiling the concrete idea of “man” – is beginning to become established. Human medical reproductive technology – at first hailed and propagated enthusiastically – is shown as an ambivalent process that can lead to remarkable outcomes but that must also bear the burden of tragic failures. In addition, it broaches the issue of the institutional and organisational framework that structures the proceedings of a temporary third-party funded project along with all its basic difficulties.

Particularly remarkable is the fact that all project participants have managed to include current topics evolving from the research project not only into their own departments’ course offer but also into panel discussions and public events. Thus, new insights were immediately integrated into teaching and presented to a wider public. On top of that, two participants have successfully completed their PhDs on topics from the research project.

The editor, Arno Bammé, is a sociologist and didact. He was Head of the Department of Technology and Science Research at Klagenfurt University until 2012. His main field of work is the sociology of science and technology. Since 2011, Bammé is Head of the Ferdinand-Tönnies-Gesellschaft in Klagenfurt. He edits important papers by Ferdinand Tönnies and Rudolf Goldscheid, among others.