Research profile

Stine Willum Adrian is an Associate Professor in Techno-Anthropology at Aalborg University, Denmark. She is trained as a sociologist and holds a PhD in feminist STS and cultural analysis from the Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Adrian’s work has always been interdisciplinary joining ethnography of medical technologies and feminist theory with cultural analysis, ethics and law. Her research interests lie in questions concerning reproductive technologies of life and death, gender, intersectionality, the entanglement of technologies, ethics and ethnographic methods. Theoretically she is particularly interested in feminist materialisms.

Over the years, Adrian has carried out several comprehensive ethnographic fieldworks of reproductive technologies. Her PhD engaged in new creation stories at fertility clinics and sperm banks in Denmark and Sweden. By following egg, sperm and the embryos as field imaginaries, she inquired into what emerge, as reproductive technologies are used at fertility clinics. Subsequently she has studied the globalization of Danish sperm and the increase in fertility travelers coming to Denmark for donor sperm. This study got her engaged in inquiring how ethics emerge and is being negotiated in relation to sperm banking and sperm donation. Adrian is also researching kinship, love and legacy, as men are having sperm deposits in private sperm banks. Currently Adrian is a PI of the project called Technologies of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life funded by the Danish Independent Research Fund. The research program, draws on Adrian’s extensive techno-anthropological research experiences studying the technologies of life. In this project this agenda is turned around, now focusing on technologies of death by asking: How does technology remake death and dying at the beginning of life?

Adrian is published in journals like European Journal of Women’s Studies, Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory, Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research, BioSocieties and Science as Culture.