Hunting Family Faculty Fellow
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"Surveillance Paternalism: Monitoring Reproduction in Turkey"
Data technologies are increasingly deployed worldwide for the systematic collection and analysis of reproductive health information. Nowhere is this more evident than in Turkey, where national concerns about declining birth rates have converged with the global push for health tracking over the last decade. Drawing on extended ethnographic and archival research, Surveillance Paternalism traces how these technologies are imagined, implemented, and experienced by activists, health workers, and patients, situating them within the broader history of reproductive politics in Turkey. Moving beyond individualized concerns about data privacy, the book reconceptualizes surveillance not as an all-encompassing, totalizing power but as a partial, situated, and stratified mechanism of reproductive governance. By analyzing disruptions to people’s reproductive lives that do not make it into the database, such as labor precarity, domestic abuse, and state violence, the book argues that surveillance often operates not through what is monitored but through what is omitted and rendered invisible. Tracing the social life of data technologies and people's responses to them, the book raises broader questions about the relationship between health data and reproductive justice.
Seda Saluk is Assistant Professor of Women's and Gender Studies.
