There can’t be many sociologists who present their academic work as a piece of theatre, but that is exactly what Dr Amrita Pande from the Department of Sociology has been doing, with huge success.
Pande, who has been researching the fast-growing commercial surrogacy market in India (worth US$2,3 billion a year) for several years, turned her work into an interactive performance, with the assistance of a Danish producer and director. The first performance was at the German Sociological Association in 2010, but since then she has played to ordinary theatregoers in Denmark and Sweden, touring 14 cities in the latter country. Pande presented an English-only version in Copenhagen in June 2014, after which she hopes to perform it at the American Sociological Association conference.
As the biggest unregulated market in the world, commercial surrogacy has deservedly received significant media attention. Pande’s research, which involved living in a surrogacy hostel and interviewing several surrogates, sets out to shine a light into the hidden corners of the industry and to set right some of the myths surrounding it – including the belief that the surrogates are passive victims who are exploited by unscrupulous clinics and their clients.
Dr Pande is also working on a book, Wombs in Labour: Transnational commercial surrogacy in India, to be published by Columbia University Press in the USA and Open University Press in India in 2014.
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