Contributors

Lukas Batschelet is a geographer and student assistant at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern. Having initially worked as a teacher, he turned to geography and its digital methods and today combines social and cultural geography with design and digital technologies. He develops open, participatory tools and visual formats for gathering, analysing and communicating social and subjective experiences of space.

Nicolo Bernasconi is a graphic designer, illustrator, and photographer from Solothurn. After studying graphic design at the Fachklasse für Grafik in Biel, he completed a Master's in Communication Design at the Bern University of the Arts. Prior to this, he trained as an architectural draughtsman and worked as an on-air designer at Swiss public broadcaster SRF in Zurich, where he developed visual identities and programme appearances. His work encompasses communication design, corporate design, knowledge visualization, exhibition design, and signage. He works independently for cultural and commercial clients and is an artist-researcher at the HKB. Together with the editorial team, he developed the maps for this book and implemented the visual concept and design for this publication.

Regina Dürig writes prose, texts for the stage, radio plays, and children's and young adult books, as well as exercises and experiments. Her most recent publication is the short-story collection «Frauen und Steine» (Droschl). She has received numerous awards for her work, including the Culture Prize of the City of Biel/Bienne and the Literature Prize of the Canton of Bern. She teaches creative writing, among other places at the Bern University of the Arts, and completed a doctorate in creative writing with an artistic project on Alice Kober. She accompanied the authors of the present volume in literary mentorships.

Mia Gujer is a freelance graphic designer with an interest in critical thinking, colour, form and research. She completed her bachelor's degree at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts in 2023. In her bachelor's thesis she examined the opportunities and risks of artificial intelligence in graphic design. Since 2020 she has worked with Svenja Kolly as kollygujer in an interdisciplinary studio in Zurich. In 2025 she took over the co-direction of the Weltformat Graphic Design Festival Lucerne. Since 2026 she has been an assistant on the Transformation Design programme at the Bern University of the Arts. Before training as a graphic designer she worked as a political campaign manager and activist. She was co-responsible for the typographic realisation of this book.

Sarah Hildebrand is an artist, photographer and author; she lives in Cologne and works nomadically. She studied fine art at HEAD in Geneva and at the HFBK Hamburg, as well as photography at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin. Her work has been exhibited internationally and published by, among others, art&fiction (Lausanne), the Christoph Merian Verlag (Basel) and the Kehrer Verlag (Heidelberg). She is a co-founder of the studio house P2–P3 (Cologne) and of the Achterhaus Ateliergemeinschaft e.V. (Hamburg), as well as a member of the Writers' Room Hamburg. She is currently working between Tunis and Québec on a book on trauma and resilience.

Surangika Jayarathne is a geographer with a background in international relations, law, social geography and gender studies. In her doctoral thesis at the University of Bern she examined transnational adoptions between Sri Lanka and Switzerland, focusing on birth mothers and adopted children in Switzerland and on how adoption continues to shape their everyday lives. Her work deals more broadly with women in South Asia, emotions, geopolitics, and the lives of children and young people in transnational and postcolonial contexts.

Svenja Kolly is a freelance graphic designer; she lives in Baden and, in her graphic work, moves between experiment, typography and coding. In 2025 she completed her bachelor's degree in graphic design at the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts. For her bachelor's thesis she conceived and designed a bilingual publication on the Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman. Since 2020 she has worked with Mia Gujer in an interdisciplinary studio in Zurich and co-directs the Weltformat Graphic Design Festival Lucerne.

Nora Komposch is a geographer and works at the University of Zurich. As a doctoral researcher at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, she examined the connections between agricultural labour in southern Spain's berry production and the family lives of Moroccan female harvest workers. For her ethnographic research she spent eight months in Spain and Morocco between 2021 and 2024.

Ashish Kulshreshtha is a software developer with a master's degree in computer science who brings his lifelong passion for photography and documentary film to collaborative ethnographic work. Between 2021 and 2023 he worked with Surangika Jayarathne on a study of transnational adoptions between Sri Lanka and Switzerland, documenting the intimate landscapes of family separation. All the photographs in this chapter are his. He lives in Bern and works at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern.

Yolinliztli Pérez-Hernández is a feminist anthropologist and ethnographer specialising in social inequalities in health care, particularly in the area of sexual and reproductive health. She was born and raised in Morelos, central Mexico, in a family of five children. After her fifth birth, her mother asked for a tubal ligation — she felt she already had «too many children». Years later she tried to have it reversed. She wanted another baby, but it was no longer possible. This story has stayed with Yolinliztli Pérez-Hernández. As a researcher she has returned to it again and again, trying to understand not only her mother's decision but also the circumstances that led her to it.

Laura Perler works at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern, where she researches global politics of reproduction at the intersection of science, art and activism. She also cares for three children and a dog in Fribourg. Her dissertation on transnational egg donation was shown in Berlin and Bern as part of the exhibition «Babys machen: Eizellenspende und Reproduktionspolitiken» and published as the monograph «Selektiviertes Leben: Eine feministische Perspektive auf die Eizellenspende» by edition assemblage. In her work she combines critical perspectives with political engagement and the conviction that thinking and working succeed best collectively and in friendly bonds.

Sven Rufer is a documentary filmmaker based in Zurich whose work focuses on social injustices. In his documentary «The Invisibles», produced in collaboration with the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, he documents the living and working conditions in the berry industry of Huelva. Some of the photographs in this book are taken from this film.

Lucy Sabin is a researcher and artist with a background in human geography and communication design. She works on air and atmosphere, feminist science studies and ecological justice. She is currently a Research Fellow at the University of Sussex. Lucy Sabin accompanied Nora Komposch in her fieldwork and took many of the photographs in the corresponding chapter.

Tamara Sánchez-Pérez is a documentary photographer who works with community-based and participatory visual storytelling. Her work combines photography, the facilitation of community processes and inclusive cultural projects. She engages with reproductive politics and collective memory processes, with a focus on grassroots initiatives in Spain and Latin America. She has visually accompanied and documented the two research projects by Laura Perler.

Jimmy Schmid is Professor of Communication Design at the Bern University of the Arts and head of the degree programme Signaletik – Environmental Communication Design. He studied graphic design in Lucerne and at the École nationale supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and has many years of professional experience in communication design, corporate design, knowledge visualisation, knowledge communication, exhibitions and signage. Together with the editorial team, he developed the maps for this book and realised the visual concept and design for the volume as a whole.

Carolin Schurr is Professor of Social and Cultural Geography, co-director of the mLAB at the Institute of Geography, and affiliated with the Interdisciplinary Centre for Gender Studies at the University of Bern. Her research investigates how global processes — such as reproductive medicine, population policies or digitalisation — transform the intimate sphere. Together with her team she experiments with new methods of data collection and science communication at the intersection of feminist research, art and digital media. She is committed to power-critical spaces of learning and teaching, enjoys supporting students and staff in their research projects, and is deeply grateful for the privilege of caring for and loving her three children every day.

Veronika Siegl is a social anthropologist and gender studies scholar at the University of Vienna. She is interested in questions of ethics, inequality and self-determination in the context of reproductive medicine. Based on her dissertation, in 2023 she published the monograph «Intimate Strangers: Commercial Surrogacy in Russia and Ukraine and the Making of Truth» (Cornell University Press), for which she received the Sharon Stephens Prize of the American Ethnological Society. The collaboration between Sarah Hildebrand and Veronika Siegl also gave rise to the chapter «Zehn Monate / Ten Months» in the photo-text volume «hope» (2018, Christoph Merian Verlag). In her current research project, Veronika Siegl works on the negotiation of life and death in the context of abortions following a prenatal diagnosis in Austria.

Kasia Strek is a documentary photographer, author and researcher who focuses on reproductive rights, gender-based violence, civilians in conflict and the human impacts of climate change. She documents and photographs human rights violations and the long-term effects of political events on people's everyday lives in crisis regions. Her work has received numerous awards and grants — it has been supported, among others, by the Pulitzer Center — and has been published in leading international media. Images from Kasia Strek's project «The Price of Choice» document abortion mobilities between Poland and Germany and accompany the corresponding chapter.

Milena Wegelin works as a research associate in the Midwifery division at the Bern University of Applied Sciences. There she initiated and led the participatory research project REFPER. Reproductive Health – the Perspective of Refugee Women in Switzerland. She teaches and researches on Sexual and Reproductive Health and Rights in contexts of forced migration and is concerned with reproductive justice. Together with Laura Perler she worked on the research project Reproductive Geopolitics on pregnancy and birth in Swiss asylum centres.

Mirko Winkel is an artist, curator and coordinator of the mLAB, a laboratory at the Institute of Geography at the University of Bern that fosters artistic approaches in research and dialogical knowledge communication. He studied fine art and performance art and comes from the former GDR. In his research-based and context-sensitive work he experiments with narrative forms in order to look afresh at societal problem areas, and explores how different knowledge practices can be translated into one another. He also works at the EcoArtLab of the Bern University of the Arts. He took on the curatorial direction of the exhibition «Atlas der Reproduktion».

Armando Zacarías completed his doctorate in fine arts, aesthetics and art studies at the Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2025. He grew up as an only child in Puebla, surrounded by a large crowd of cousins, aunts and uncles. His mother was a single parent; his father left early. Armando Zacarías grew up with the stories of women — about having children, about not having children, the dream of large families, of a better life, of being left behind. His research gave him the opportunity to hear these stories in a different way, through other materials, other gestures, other forms.