Transplant Imaginaries is an AHRC-funded project that engages with organ transplantation through the lens of contemporary literature and film. It explores ways in which these media raise important issues often ignored or dismissed in other areas.
The term transplant imaginaries captures the imaginative side of the project, where literature and film are critical media that reflect, contest and reimagine current, historical and future bioethical concerns and biotechnological innovations. The project turns to ideas around time and space to rethink the ethics of embodiment and belonging in the context of both biotechnological innovations that extend life and histories of violence that use science to justify racial and sexual segregation and hierarchisation. The project engages with the contemporary need for social justice, the ongoing unequal access to health care and persistent divisions that rely on supposed scientific definitions of the body. Transplant Imaginaries offers insight to alternative accounts of individual and collective bodies and thereby proposes ways of thinking and doing justice differently.
The project’s resources should be useful to students and professionals alike, as well as to people who have been involved in the transplant process, particularly in offering ways of interpreting and understanding narratives of transplantation. Transplant Imaginaries aims to develop understandings of what are often deemed impossible – and yet prevalent – experiences post-transplantation.
Transplant Imaginaries 