Caroline H. Bledsoe

Melville J. Herskovits Professor of African Studies

Professor (Ph.D. Stanford 1976)
1810 Hinman Avenue, Room 201
(847) 491-4825
cbledsoe@northwestern.edu

Bledsoe’s projects in West Africa have centered on cultural visions of marriage, fertility and contraception, and child fosterage, several of which have been followed by U.S. and European counterpart studies. Her most formative project, in The Gambia (Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa, 2002, University of Chicago Press; contributions by Fatoumatta Banja), confronted Western views of the life course, which equate aging with the passage of linear time, with a West African model, which views aging as contingent on the cumulative effects of “wear,” especially, for women, that encountered in obstetric trauma. A subsequent study of technical writings in Western obstetrics, most notably by Chicago obstetrics pioneer Joseph B. De Lee, both revealed unmistakable support for the African view and deepened ideas of how “nature” comes to be. A book is in preparation (Selecting Populations, Selecting Memories: The Evolution of Visions of Childbearing in Twentieth Century America.) Her current project is “Transnational vital events: birth, law, and migration between Africa and Europe,” based at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Rostock, Germany. It asks how people distribute their key life moments – especially birth and marriage – across international boundaries as rights to work and live in Europe shift so dramatically. A book, The Demography of Family Reunification in Afro-Iberia, is planned, and in 2007, she will co-chair The Berlin Roundtables on Transnationality, Irmgard Coninx Foundation. Theme: “Population Politics and Human Rights.” She has been supported by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Mellon foundations, the National Science Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

Recent courses taught

332 – Anthropology of Reproduction
389 – Ethnographic Methods and Analysis
390 – Making Numbers Talk
490 – Transnational Vital Events

Recent books

2002 Contingent Lives: Fertility, Time, and Aging in West Africa, with

contributions by Fatoumatta Banja. University of Chicago Press,

Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures. Lewis Henry Morgan Lecture Series.

University of Chicago Press, 2002. Amaury Talbot Prize (Royal

Anthropological Institute, UK); Eileen Basker Prize, Society for Medical

Anthropology; finalist, Melville J. Herskovits Book award, African

Studies Association.

2000 Fertility and the Male Life Cycle in the Era of Fertility Decline. C.

Bledsoe, Susana Lerner, and Jane Guyer, eds. Clarendon: Oxford

University Press.

Some recent papers

In press. Caroline H. Bledsoe, René Houle and Papa Sow. “High fertility

Gambians in low fertility Spain: mutually entailed lives across

international space.” Demographic Research.

In press. Caroline H. Bledsoe and Rachel Scherrer. “The dialectics of

disruption: paradoxes of nature and professionalism in

contemporary American childbearing.” Reproductive Disruptions:

Gender, Technology, and Ethics in the New Millennium. Marcia C.

Inhorn, ed. Oxford: Berghahn.

In press Bledsoe, Caroline H. et al. “Regulating creativity: research and

survival in the IRB iron cage.” Northwestern Law Review. Special

issue: “Censorship and Institutional Review Boards.” Philip

Hamburger and James Lindgren, eds.

In prep. “From circulation to substitution: family reunification policy and

African migrant life in Spain.” Globalism, Reproduction, and the

State. Carole Browner and Carolyn Sargent, eds.

2005. “Reproductive relativity: time, space, and Western contraception in

rural Gambia.” Ahfad Journal: Special issue.

2004. “Reproduction at the margins: migration and legitimacy in the New

Europe.” Demographic Research, Special Collection 3. Pp. 85-116.

2002. Jane Maslow Cohen and Caroline Bledsoe, "Immigrants, agency, and

allegiance: some notes from anthropology and the law." Engaging

Cultural Differences: Multicultural Challenges in Liberal Democracies.

Eds. Richard Shweder, Hazel Markus, and Martha Minnow. New York:

Russell Sage Press.

2001. "The bodily costs of childbearing: Western science through a West

African lens.” Children and Anthropology: Perspectives for the Twenty-

First Century, Helen Schwartzman, ed. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood

Press. Pp. 57-81

Some recent presentations, invited lectures

In prep. “The unsettling power of ethnography: interpreting public-use

quantitative data on African immigrants in Spain.” University of

Chicago MacLean Center in Medical Ethics.

2006. "The demography of family reunification: from circulation to

substitution in Gambian Spain." Paper for the Bay Area Colloquium in

Population, Berkeley, California.

2005 "Joseph B. De Lee and the battle over obstetrics in tenement Chicago."

University of Chicago Department of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Grand

Rounds presentation.

2005 “High fertility Gambians in low fertility Spain: the ethnographic

exploration of a demographic anomaly.” Max Planck Institute for

Demographic Research, Rostock, Germany. Kollokvium presentation.

2005 “High fertility Gambians in low fertility Spain: the ethnographic

exploration of a demographic anomaly.” Universitat Autonoma de

Barcelona.

2004 "Acts of selection: reproduction and risk in contemporary America."

- University of Chicago. Committee on Human Development.

- Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

- Working Group on Anthropology and Population. Brown University.

- Working Group on Health, Healing and Ritual Practice, Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies. Harvard University:

2004 “Generating Northwestern anthropologists: evidence from the archives.”

Melville J. Herskovits Roundtable discussion organized by Richard

Joseph, African Studies Association, New Orleans.

2003 "It's about time -- and space: the bodily costs of reproduction in West

Africa and beyond." Inaugural Melville J. Herskovits Professorship

lecture, Northwestern University.

2003 "African reproduction and the dynamics of time and space."

- Global Development, Population, and Rural Livelihoods

seminar, Institute of Social Studies, The Hague, Netherlands.

- Institut National d'Études Démographiques, Paris.