This workshop, with invited speakers and other participants, offered an opportunity for contributors from a number of different academic and professional backgrounds to think together about how we conceptualise ‘conception’ (in both its biological and its intellectual senses) and how we deal with the ‘not-knowing’ essential to contragestive time (where ‘conception’ may or may not have occurred). The workshop explored a cluster of related themes including:

The intellectual genealogy of the concept of ‘conception’.
The transdisciplinary or ‘nomadic’ movement of the concept of conception across ancient theories of generation, the early life sciences, biology, theology, philosophy, psychoanalysis and the humanities more generally. The distinction and the relation between the concepts of ‘conception’ and ‘fertilisation’ and the ambiguities of their literal and metaphorical uses. How conceptualisation is related to or disjunctive with the state of not-knowing in ‘contragestive time’ – can ‘not-knowing’ be conceptualised at all? Or must ‘not-knowing’ be conceptualised in order to be tolerated? The relation between ‘conception’ and Wilfred Bion’s notion of ‘preconception’. The possible relation between ‘not-knowing’ and Stenger’s notion of ‘care of the possible’.

Invited speakers and Respondents:

Tuija Pulkkinen, Professor Emerita Philosophy/Women’s Studies, University of Helsinki, specialist in history of concepts and feminist theory, editor of the Redescriptions journal. Susanne Lettow, Professor of Philosophy, Free University of Berlin; PI on the research project ‘The Dynamics of the Reproductive Economy: Forms of Appropriation in Global Fertility Chains’. Tobias Jenkins, director of the Squiggle Foundation. He holds a PhD in English Literature from King's College London and an MSc in Theoretical Psychoanalytic Studies from the Psychoanalysis Unit at University College London. Honorary psychotherapist at Camden Psychotherapy Unit and a Senior Befriender at Maytree Respite Centre. Holly Isard, Engaged Research Fellow on the Contragestive Time project. She holds a PhD from the University of West London (Wellcome-Trust funded). Her thesis explored the political economy of pregnancy through a Marxist feminist framework. Isabel Davis, Research Theme Leader in Collections and Culture, Natural History Museum London, author of Conceiving Histories: Trying for Pregnancy, Past and Present.
Lisa Baraitser, Professor of Psychosocial Theory, Birkbeck, University of London and PI of the Contragestive Time project.