There is undeniably a new visibility to how hormones are talked about, experienced, accessed, and denied in Aotearoa. While shaped by some international debates – both on social media and medical research – the conversations in Aotearoa also attend to a very complex local reality.
In this evening public talk, Associate Professor Alice Beban and Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton enliven our understanding of hormones by sharing from their research on/about/for hormones.
Alice will present findings from a national advocacy survey on the 2024 transdermal estrogen patch shortage, highlighting the many reasons people use hormone therapy, the physical and emotional distress caused by systemic barriers to essential medication, and the workarounds users adopt to navigate supply disruptions. Nayan will present a critical analysis on how gendered language and science co-construct a biological material – a hormone in particular – and the implications of this on human health and wellbeing.
Speakers:
Associate Professor Alice Beban is a sociologist at Massey University. Her work spans political ecology, the sociology of emotions, and environmental governance in Southest Asia and Aotearoa New Zealand. Recently, Alice has applied her sociological lens to health equity in Aotearoa, co-developing community-led research to document the lived impacts of estrogen patch shortages and pelvic floor issues.
Dr. Nayantara Sheoran Appleton is feminist medical anthropologist and Science and Technology Studies Scholar at the School of Science in Society at Te Hergenga Waka | Victoria University of Wellington. She has recently published Demographic Desires: Medicine, Media, and Emergency Contraception in India. Today’s talk is inspired by her research on Social Lives of Sex Hormones, funded by the Royal Society’s Marsden Fast Start and The Reproductive Futures Lab.
