Maria Kramer is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Sociology. She completed her PhD in Sociology at LSE in 2020 and holds an interdisciplinary MA in History and Sociology from Koç University, Istanbul. Maria’s research expertise is in the areas of medical sociology and science and technology studies. Her research explores reproductive governance, family making and scientific knowledge production in Turkey in an age of genomic health care. Maria’s PhD focused on the impact of reproductive genetic health services on the making of “healthy” families in Turkey by exploring how kin marriage is being conceptualized, managed, and negotiated as a genetic risk factor and reproductive health concern within intersecting biomedical and genetic spaces in contemporary Turkey. It asked how notions of “healthy” reproduction and “healthy” familyhood inform the health policies, discourses and practices surrounding the biomedical management of kin marriage, and how couples practicing kin marriage respond to and negotiate concepts of “risky reproduction” and “genetic risk” within medicalized spaces. The project shed light on how the expansion of reproductive genetic health services opens up new sites for the (self)surveillance and (self)management of family making and reproduction at the molecular level in Turkey while affecting an extension of long-standing, unsettling affinities between medicine, nationalisms and state governance into the 21st century. 

Publications

Kramer, M. (2015). Genetic discrimination: Transatlantic perspectives on the case for a European-level legal response. Disability & Society, 31(1), 1-3 (book review).