Professor Amrita Pande will deliver her lecture, “White Eggs, Black Wombs: Staging the Baby Business”, on Wednesday, 15 October 2025 at 18:00 SAST at Auditorium LT1, Neville Alexander Building, on lower campus.

Professor Pande’s lecture will examine how assisted reproductive technologies have transformed reproduction into a global marketplace. She will explore the intimate and embodied forms of labour involved in egg donation and surrogacy, situating these within broader frameworks of global migration, political economy and racial capitalism. Through a combination of lecture and performance, she will reflect on the lives of South African egg providers and Indian and Ghanaian surrogates, asking what these technologies mean for the futures we dare or fear to imagine.

Professor Pande is a professor of Sociology and Fellow at UCT whose research focuses on transnational reproduction, repro-genetic justice and multimodal ethnography. Her book, Wombs in Labor: Transnational Surrogacy in India, has been widely recognised and adapted into a multimedia performance staged worldwide. Her work has been published in leading journals and edited volumes, and she has written for international newspapers while appearing on major media platforms including the BBC, TRT World, Danish National Television, SABC and SAfm.

Over the past two decades, she has conducted a “mobile ethnography” of global fertility clinics in India, Cambodia, Ghana and South Africa. She is completing her next book for MIT Press and continues to combine scholarship with creative expression. She has held visiting fellowships and professorships at Boston University, Brandeis University and the Institut Convergence Migrations in Paris. In 2022, she founded the South African chapter of Women Walk at Midnight to reclaim public spaces for women and bring feminist joy to city nights.

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