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2026 Hancock Lecture – Remaking reproduction: gender, artifice and population futures

Join the Australian Academy of the Humanities for the 2026 Hancock Lecture, Remaking reproduction: gender, artifice and population futures, delivered by Dr Jaya Keaney.

Remaking reproduction: gender, artifice and population futures

While in vitro fertilisation, or IVF, has been commonplace since the 1980s, new technologies such as uterus transplants, artificial wombs, and lab-grown sperm and eggs take reproduction beyond the limits of what we think the body can do. These technologies promise to solve the population “crisis” of falling birth rates facing many parts of Asia and the global North by intervening into fertility on a cellular scale. Such technologies make reproduction increasingly artificial, reorganising the relations between gender, biology, and generation. And yet, today gender is also forcefully defined as natural in a populist “gender critical” discourse, which takes issue with gender both as an analytic category and a field of Humanities inquiry. In this populist discourse, there are males and females, with distinct reproductive anatomy: gender is biological sex, nothing more. How should we understand these two, divergent narratives? In this talk, I explore reproduction as a site of contest across multiple scales, from the cellular to the populational, that is bound to what I term artifice as much as to nature.

Event Details

Tuesday 29 September 2026
5.30 – 7.30pm AEST

Elisabeth Murdoch Theatre
The University of Melbourne

Registrations close at 4.30pm AEST
28 September 2026.

Register

About Dr Jaya Keaney

Dr Jaya Keaney is a Senior Lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Melbourne. Her research develops feminist theories of race, reproduction, and inheritance by drawing together approaches from gender and cultural studies and science and technology studies. Her monograph, Making Gaybies: Queer Reproduction and Multiracial Feeling, was published by Duke University Press in 2023, and received citations in two international prizes (Rachel Carson Prize; Eileen Basker Memorial Prize). It examines the racial and gendered imaginaries that structure queer reproduction in the transnational fertility industry. Jaya’s research has appeared in journals including Body & Society; Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience; Science Technology & Human Values; and History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences. Prior to her role at the University of Melbourne, Jaya was a postdoctoral research fellow at Deakin University. She has also taken up visiting fellowships at Kings College London and the University of Cambridge. Jaya recently served as an expert advisor for the Australian Law Reform Commission’s Review of Surrogacy Laws (2025-26).

About the Hancock Lecture

The Academy is dedicated to supporting and celebrating emerging leaders in the humanities. Named in honour of W K Hancock, the first President of the Academy, the Hancock Lecture invites outstanding scholars at the earlier stages of their careers to talk about their work to a public audience.

Emeritus Professor Sir (William) Keith Hancock KBE FAHA (1898—1988) was a Foundation Fellow and the first President of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. This lecture is made possible by a bequest from the estate of Sir Keith. The first Sir Keith Hancock Lecture was given by (then) Associate Professor Christine Alexander in 1993.

Since 1993 we’ve hosted the lecture almost every year.

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Acknowledgement of Country

The Australian Academy of the Humanities recognises Australia’s First Nations Peoples as the traditional owners and custodians of this land, and their continuous connection to country, community and culture.