Infertile Environments: Proliferating Scales of Exposure in Men’s Reproductive Health Research

Why is reproductive health and men’s infertility in particular such an important lens through which people understand environmental problems? What does the environment mean to those studying its relationship to reproductive and development health? In this talk, I explore these questions through a focus on epigenetic research conducted by toxicologists in China at a moment of growing concern about fertility rates and toxic exposures. Drawing on fieldwork conducted primarily in Nanjing, I show how epigenetic research into men’s health has proliferated ideas of what constitutes the environment, as well as the ways such environments and their effects are inherited by future generations.