2026 Hancock Lecture - Dr Jaya Keaney
Hancock Lecture
This year’s Hancock Lecture will be 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.
About Dr Jaya Keaney
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).
Event Details
Hancock Lecture: Dr Jaya Keaney
Event Date: 5.30-7.30pm, Tuesday 29 September 2026
Venue: G06 Theatre, Elizabeth Murdoch Building (Building 134), The University of Melbourne, Parkville, Melbourne
Note: The Hancock Lecture will be followed by a reception.
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Diversity & equity at our events
Our Academy Lecture, Brotherhood: Gender and the German Peasants’ War 1524-26, delivered by Emeritus Regius Professor Lyndal Roper FAHA, recipient of the 2026 Holberg Prize, is scheduled for 5.30pm on Wednesday 30 September, also at the University of Melbourne.
The lecture is presented in partnership with the Holberg Prize. If you would like to attend this lecture, please register here: https://events.humanitix.com/2026-academy-lecture.
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