News

Guest commentary in the NZZ: The ivory tower university is long gone: why transdisciplinary research is needed

The social sciences are criticized for their collaboration with practical groups. However, this collaboration is needed so that scientists can contribute to solving urgent social crises.
A guest commentary by Hanna Hilbrandt, Carolin Schurr, and Claske Dijkema

27.3.2024 Special Screening: "The Invisible – Modern Slavery in Europe" by Sven Rufer

OVd, Wednesday, 27.03.2024, Cinema in the Reitschule (Neubrückstrasse 8), Bern
Door opening 18:30
Film screening 19:00
Discussion 20:15
Admission free, collection

Swissinfo: Illegally adopted children from Sri Lanka: "These wounds will not heal"

Their Sri Lankan roots were cut off, but they didn't feel completely Swiss either: doctoral student Surangika Jayarathne's study is the first to show the consequences of adoption in Switzerland for the children concerned.

Barbara-Lischetti-Prize 2022: Dr. Laura Perler

At the Dies academicus 2022, Dr. Laura Perler was awarded the Barbara Lischetti Prize for her excellent dissertation "The Promise of a Healthy Child. An Analysis of the Spanish Egg Donation Economy" with the Barbara Lischetti Award. This award is given to young researchers at the University of Bern for an excellent dissertation that deals with a topic of gender studies or uses a corresponding approach. The Barbara Lischetti Prize is awarded every two years by the scientific advisory board of the IZFG.

WOZ article from 18.05.2023: Interview with Nora Komposch: Moroccan women harvesters: Solidarity under the sign of the strawberry

In the fields of Huelva, southern Spain, women pickers are suffering. But unionization is a challenge.

Exhibition "Making Babies? Egg Donation and Reproductive Policies"

Exhibition "Making Babies? Egg Donation and Reproductive Policies"
(Duration: 25.11.2022 - 14.01.2023)

Banned in Switzerland, permitted elsewhere: egg donation. The exhibition takes a close look at this reproductive technique with its social, ethical and economic implications. In this country, the political discussion about legalizing the procedure is red-hot: only in September, the Council of States gave the green light to consider legalizing egg donation in Switzerland as well. The exhibition offers a scientific-artistic examination of a current topic.

PostTagesanzeiger 17.03.2022: Legalisation does not stop reproductive tourism.

Swiss intended parents should no longer have to travel abroad to donate eggs.
abroad for an egg donation. The often precarious situation of the donors is forgotten.
- A newspaper article by Prof. Dr Carolin Schurr and Dr Laura Perler

SRF Post 20.03.2022: Interview with Dr. Laura Perler about the legalisation of Egg donation in Switzerland

"There are many difficult stories behind the donors".
The National Council wants to legalise egg cell donation. Unlike sperm donations, these are not yet permitted in Switzerland. Every year, hundreds of women travel abroad to have an egg implanted. Researcher Laura Perler explains why egg donation is often just one of many bad options for donors - and also not without health risks.

Post 20Minuten 3.3.22: Swiss parents fear for surrogate babies from Ukraine

The war in Ukraine is causing drama for the booming surrogate mother industry. Now Switzerland has allowed five babies to enter the country.

For Carolin Schurr, it's clear: "The war in Ukraine is merely washing to the surface grievances that have existed for years." Schurr heads the Department of Social and Cultural Geography at the University of Bern and has done intensive research on surrogacy, which is also a business in Mexico and the United States.

Post Kronen Zeitung 11.3.22: What happens to the babies of surrogate mothers in war

It is not known how many babies are currently born to surrogate mothers in Ukraine and cannot be collected. As the surrogate mother agency VittoriaVita announced on March 3, most of its surrogate mothers are "in safe regions of the country" and receive medical and psychological care.

Cultural geographer Carolin Schurr of the University of Bern has been studying the transnational surrogacy market and the geopolitical conditions that turn countries into hotspots for years. She calls for an international agreement comparable to the 1993 Hague Convention to regulate international adoptions. "National regulations fall short," the professor says. What is needed, she says, are international standards, such as how surrogate mothers are protected in the event of health damage.

Post Badische Zeitung 12.3.22: Surrogate mothers in Ukraine: hundreds of parents worldwide fear for their babies

Women with newborns in air-raid shelters, babies in the arms of soldiers during evacuation, nursing mothers on the run: The images from Kiev and other Ukrainian cities and from the border region are shocking. After the outbreak of war, not only millions of Ukrainians fear for their children, but also hundreds of so-called intended parents worldwide, because Ukraine is considered a center of commercial surrogacy.

Awarded Leopold Scheidl Prize for Economic Geography 2020

Nora Komposch's master's thesis entitled "Worker Cooperatives' Potential to Transform Migrant Women's Social Position and Agency" was awarded the "Leopold Scheidl Prize for Economic Geography 2020" by the Austrian Geographical Society.

SRF contribution - Echo der Zeit: Surrogacy - pros and cons

Surrogacy - pro and contra

Surrogacy is prohibited in Switzerland. In many countries, however, surrogacy is legal - and a flourishing business. How should Switzerland deal with this? Should surrogacy be legalised here too?

- An Echo der Zeit Article by Iwan Santoro

Guest commentary in Tagesanzeiger by Veronika Siegl and Laura Perler (only available in german)

Justice at the expense of egg donors? Allowing couples who wish to have children to donate their eggs by law is not as straightforward as it seems.

Article in "Der Bund" with Carolin Schurr: Baby aus den USA – doch dann wirds kompliziert

The newspaper "Der Bund" quotes Prof. Carolin Schurr: "Surrogate motherhood should be recognized as a form of work similar to sex work and paid accordingly." She calls for a debate on the conditions under which surrogacy is possible. (The article is only available in German)

Blog Entry about the Care-Giving Academic (based on GIUB survey results)

Carolin Schurr, Heike Mayer and Andrea Winiger wrote a blog entry on Gendercampus about the results of a survey in the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern.

Paper "Killing the joy, feeling the cruelty: Feminist geographies of nationalism in Azerbaijan" by Elisabeth Militz

BHK - New Methods in Geography

Digital Methods in Geography

Paper Complicating notions of violence: An embodied view of violence against women in Honduras by Maaret Jokela-Pansini

Article in the Encyclopedia of Human Georaphy by Elisabeth Militz and Carolin Schurr

Kick-Off Event of the ASG Thematic Group

Bernese colloquium of human geography: Digital Geographies

Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr new in the Editorial Board of the Geographica Helvetica

Keynote Prof. Dr. Carolin and Prof. Dr. Peter Weichhart at the DKG 2019

Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr and Prof. Dr. Peter Weichhart (University of Vienna) opened the German congress for Geography in Kiel 2019 with the keynote speech „From Margin to Center? Theoretische Aufbrüche in der Geographie seit Kiel 1969“

Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr in the Editorial Board of the Geographica Helvetica

Winners of the Ashby prizes: Carolin Schurr and Elisabeth Militz

Public lecture: Digitalisierung intimer Räume (in German)

Wednesday 15. May: presentation of podcasts

Mach mit: the unit Social and Cultural Geography read texts about "black geographies" (in German)

Am Dienstag, 14. Mai, 11.00-12 Uhr, lesen wir einen Text zur Black Geographies. Alle (inklusiv Studierende!) sind herzlich eingeladen!
Wer teilnehmen will, kann sich gerne bei Carolin Schurr (carolin.schurr@giub.unibe.ch) melden.

Prof. Heidi J. Nast: Fembots, Capitalism, and the Death Driven Machine

2nd Edition of the Urban Audiovisual Festival

The film by Julian Seiler and Florian Seifert 'Velosituation in Bern' was selected for the 2nd Edition of the Urban Audiovisual Festival in Lisbon.

Carolin Schurr's paper "Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations"

Carolin Schurr’s paper "Assemblage thinking and actor-network theory: conjunctions, disjunctions, cross-fertilisations" co-authored with Martin Müller (University of Lausanne) is for the second year the most downloaded paper from the RGS-IBG Journal "Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers“. The paper received 4,136 full-text downloads from the site in 2018 (average download in 2018 was 147).

Who cares @ GIUB?

The unit Social and Cultural Geography invites you to a lunch for the international Women's day (11 March at 12.00). "Who cares @ GIUB?"

Prof. Dr. Susan Thieme in the Board of Directors of the Science Film Academy

From 17th-19th November 2019, the Global Science Film Festival will take in Bern for the first time.

Feminist geographies at the Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2018

In collaboration with Karine Duplan from the University of Geneva, Elisabeth Militz (Unit Social- and Cultural Geogaphy) organizes the session “Bodies, Space and Difference in the Global Intimate” for the Human Geographies Symposium at the Swiss Geoscience Meeting 2018, which will take place on 30.11. and 01.12.18 at the University of Bern. The paper session will address, on the one hand, questions of sexualised and racialized body politics, and, on the other hand, the global war on terrorism and its affects and embodied experiences in intimate everyday lives.
You can find more general information on the 16th Swiss Geoscience Meeting here (https://geoscience-meeting.ch/sgm2018/).

Exit talk of Branco Weiss Fellow Carolin Schurr

At the end of her 5 year Branco Weiss Fellowship, Prof. Dr. Carolin Schurr presented the research results of her long term research on the global surrogacy market at the annual Branco Weiss Symposium of the ETH Zürich on 20 November 2018.

Radio interview with Carolin Schurr about surrogacies (Spanish)

Carolin Schurr gave an interview to the french channel RFI on surrogacy, the desire to become parents and the commercialisation of women. The interview was conducted in Spanish and is available online (click this tile).

Multiple mobilities in Mexico’s fertility industry

Schurr, Carolin. Multiple mobilities in Mexico’s fertility industry, Mobilities (2018): 1-17.

Join the unit Social and Cultural Geography in reading and discussing!

On Tuesday, October 2, 10.15 – 11.15 hrs in room 301, we will be discussing the following text:
Mountz, Alison, and Jennifer Hyndman. ‘Feminist Approaches to the Global Intimate’. Women’s Studies Quarterly 34, no. 1/2 (1 April 2006): 446–63.

Contact elisabeth.militz@giub.unibe.ch for further information.

FGB co-organizes and co-funds summer school "Gender and Space" (10.-14. Sept, 2018)

The next human geography summer school entitled "Gender and Space" will take place between 10th and 14th September 2018 in Herzberg (near Zurich). FGB Group is proudly co-organizing and co-funding this event and is contributing workshops on feminist geopolitics, emotion, affect and methodologies in feminist geographies.

Carolin Schurr joined Editorial Board of 'Gender, Place and Culture'

Carolin Schurr has joined the editorial board of Gender, Place and Culture: A journal of feminist geography in August 2018.

Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Geography

The University of Bern has appointed Carolin Schurr as Associate Professor of Cultural and Social Geography. She will take up her position on August 1 this year. As part of her appointment, she will become co-director of the university’s Geography Department.

The Baby Business Booms

Schurr, Carolin. ‘The Baby Business Booms: Economic Geographies of Assisted Reproduction’. Geography Compass, online first.

The Affective Economy of Transnational Surrogacy

Schurr, Carolin, and Elisabeth Militz. ‘The Affective Economy of Transnational Surrogacy’. Environment and Planning A online first (2018): 1–20.