skip to content

Changing (In)Fertilities

 

Biography

Dr Venetia Kantsa is Associate Professor of Social Anthropology, at the Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean, Greece and Director of the Laboratory of Family and Kinship Studies in the same Department. She holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology from London School of Economics and Political Science (2001) and her research interests focus on anthropology of kinship, anthropology of gender and sexuality, queer theory, anthropology of science, Greek ethnography and anthropology of the Mediterranean.

She has conducted extensive fieldwork on women’s same-sex sexuality in Greece, the visibility of same-sex desires, same-sex families, motherhood and new forms of parenthood, the summer lesbian community in Eresos and the history of the lesbian movement. She has also published extensively on kinship theory, gender epistemology and methodology, politics of sexuality and conceptualizations of citizenship. During the last years her research focuses on assisted reproduction, shifting conceptualizations of kinship and science, the distribution of authoritative knowledge in the context of emerging social and technological transformations, and interrelations among medical technology, law and religion.

She was a member of the international scientific network EastBordNet Cost Action (2008-2012), participated as a national stakeholder into the FP7 research program Families and Societies (20013-2018), participates as an expert evaluator on European FP7 and Horizon research programs, and is a member of the ReproSoc advisory board at the University of Cambridge. She has taught as a visiting scholar at the University of Barcelona, American University of Beirut and University of Cyprus, and has presented her work as an invited lecturer in research centres and universities in Greece and abroad.

From 2012 to 2015 she was the Principal Investigator of the three-year long research project (In)FERCIT, “(In)Fertile Citizens: On the Concepts, Practices, Politics and Technologies of Assisted Reproduction in Greece”, co-funded by the European Union and Greek national funds (http://www.in-fercit.gr/en), that aimed to offer a detailed, multi-sided ethnographic account of assisted reproduction concepts, practices, politics and technologies in Greece, relate them to legal issues and human rights on (in)fertility and reproduction, and provide a comparative perspective that would associate the Greek project with similar research conducted in specific European and non-European countries –Spain, Italy, Bulgaria, Turkey, Cyprus, Lebanon.

Publications

Key publications: 

2017 Chatjouli, A., Ivi Daskalaki, Venetia Kantsa “Parenthood and Partnerhood in the Context of Involuntary Childlessness and Assisted Reproduction in Greece”. In Charlotte Faircloth and Zeynep Gürtin (eds) “Special Section: Making Parents: Reproductive Technologies and Parenting Culture Across Borders» Sociological Research Online 22 (2)3 [http://www.socresonline.org.uk/22/2/3.html] 

2016 Kantsa, Venetia “Lesbos”. In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, Nancy A. Naples, Renee C. HooglandMaithree Wickramasinghe (eds). John Wiley and Sons Ltd

2015 Kantsa, Venetia, Lina Papadopoulou, Giulia Zanini (eds) (In)Fertile Citizens. Anthropological and Legal Challenges of Assisted Reproduction Technologies Athens, (In)FERCIT produced by Alexandria Publ. http://www.in-fercit.gr/en/archives/447

2015 Chatjouli, Aigli, Ivi Daskalaki, Venetia Kantsa Out of Body, Out of Home. Assisted Reproduction, Gender and Family in Greece Athens, (In)FERCIT produced by Alexandria Publ. http://www.in-fercit.gr/en/archives/458

2015 Kantsa, Venetia (ed.) Metavallomenes sheseis. Singeneia kai iatrikos ipovoithoumeni anaparagogi [Changing relations. Kinship and Medically Assisted Reproduction] Athens, (In)FERCIT produced by Alexandria Publ. [in Greek] http://www.in-fercit.gr/en/archives/452 

2014 Kantsa, Venetia, Aspa Chalkidou, 2014, “Doing family “in the space between the laws”. Notes on lesbian motherhood in Greece”. In Jenny Björklund and Ulrika Dahl (eds) Kinship & Reproduction. Special issue Lamda Nordica (3-4): 86-108

2014 Kantsa, Venetia, “The price of marriage: Same-sex sexualities and citizenship in Greece”. Sexualities 17: 818-836

Department of Social Anthropology and History, University of the Aegean
 Venetia  Kantsa
Not available for consultancy