Emma Mavodza | AS 2024
Emma Mavodza is a Fellow (2024/25) at the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, University of Bern, and an adjunct researcher in the URPP Human Reproduction Reloaded (H2R) at the University of Zurich. Her research sits at the intersection of development studies and anthropology, with a focus on how people at the margins engage with, negotiate, and reshape technologies within conditions of social and economic constraint. Across her work, she examines how technologies specifically, financial and reproductive, are embedded in everyday practices and how they reproduce and at times reconfigure existing social relations and inequalities.
She holds a doctoral degree in Development Studies from the University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. In her doctoral research, she examined the social life of digital money in Eswatini and Zimbabwe. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, she critically interrogates dominant narratives of mobile money as a tool for financial inclusion, showing how it is entangled in the socio-economic reproduction of precarity as well as in existing social relations, structures, and meanings within adopting communities.
In her project, Reproductive Justice and IVF: Lived Experiences of Black Women in South Africa, she brings this analytical lens to the domain of reproductive health. The project explores how infertility and assisted reproductive technologies are experienced and negotiated within specific socio-cultural and historical contexts. Focusing on Black women in South Africa, it examines how IVF is navigated both as a medical technology and as a socio-cultural process, and how reproductive choices, access to fertility care, and experiences of treatment are shaped by intersecting dynamics of race, class, and inequality. Through an ethnographic approach which combines participant observation, in-depth interviews, and participant diaries, the study foregrounds the everyday experinces of fertility care and contributes to the decentralisation of knowledge production on reproductive technologies in African contexts.
Prior to joining the Walter Benjamin Kolleg, she was a Lecturer in Eswatini (2016–2021) and an Early Career Research Fellow (2023/24) at the Collegium Helveticum, a joint institute of ETH Zurich, the University of Zurich, and Zurich University of the Arts.
Reproductive Justice and IVF: Lived Experiences of Black Women in South Africa
Infertility is a significant global health concern, affecting approximately one in six people worldwide (WHO 2023). Despite its global prevalence, research on infertility and assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) remains disproportionately concentrated in the Global North. This project addresses this imbalance by examining the socio-cultural dimensions of infertility and ART use in South Africa.
Focusing on educated Black women, the project explores how experiences of infertility intersect with the growing use of ARTs. As these women navigate expectations surrounding motherhood and kin-making, ARTs such as in vitro fertilisation (IVF) become key sites through which reproductive possibilities are negotiated. At the same time, persistent stigma surrounding childlessness continues to shape reproductive decision-making and care-seeking practices.
Grounded in the framework of reproductive justice, the project investigates how socio-cultural norms, reproductive histories, and structural inequalities influence the uptake and experience of ARTs. Particular attention is given to how race, class, and access to care shape women’s encounters with
The study adopts a qualitative, ethnographic approach, combining participant observation, in-depth interviews, and participant diaries to examine the lived experiences of Black women engaging with ARTs in South Africa. Through this approach, the project asks: What socio-cultural norms and values shape the use of ARTs? How do Black women experience IVF and related treatments? And what do these experiences reveal about evolving reproductive futures in South Africa and beyond?
Beyond its empirical contribution, the project advances efforts to decentralise knowledge production on infertility and reproductive technologies by foregrounding African contexts. In doing so, it contributes to broader debates on global reproductive health, highlighting the tensions and possibilities that shape reproductive justice in diverse settings.
