Monday, November 16, 2026 - 2:00 pm - Monday, November 16, 2026 - 3:00 pm
Blumer Room - 402 Social Sciences Building
Abstract: Across the world, women are reconsidering their reproductive futures. Amid soaring inequalities, some have given up on having children, while others are having fewer than they once imagined or changing when and how they build their families. Environmental risk, often taking the form of climate change, contamination, and ecological disasters, sits at the center of those concerns. Public debate tends to frame these concerns as anxiety about a distant, climate-altered future. Yet for many communities, environmental harm is already here, in the water they use. This talk asks how water pollution shapes women’s reproductive decision-making and, more broadly, who does the work of managing environmental risk when no institution takes responsibility for it. Drawing on over six years of community-engaged research, including 24 months of ethnographic immersion and over 100 in-depth interviews with women, men, and state officials in a rural and campesino village on Colombia’s Caribbean coast, I argue that environmental risk turns reproduction into an instrument of risk management. Bridging the insights of environmental sociology and the sociology of reproduction, I show that when institutions and industries refuse to measure or name a harm, women take on that work through their bodies and reproductive decisions. They document exposure by interpreting reproductive complications and miscarriages as evidence of contamination. They anticipate an uncertain environmental risk by delaying their pregnancies, seeking abortions, or having fewer children. As mothers, they triage protection, deciding every day what to protect and what to expose. This talk traces how the costs of contamination are distributed and centers reproduction and motherhood as crucial sites for understanding how power is felt, understood, and contested.

Bio: María Ximena Dávila is a PhD candidate in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Working at the intersection of gender, environmental justice, health, and conflict, she employs ethnographic and historical methods to dissect how large-scale inequalities shape domestic and intimate arenas of life. Her dissertation and book project, High-Risk Motherhood: War, Toxicity, and Reproduction in Colombia, follows the lives of families over two decades (1998-2025) to explore the continuities of environmental degradation and armed conflict through the lens of reproductive decision-making and motherhood. Her research has been generously supported and recognized by the American Council of Learned Societies/Mellon Foundation, the American Sociological Association, and the Latin American Studies Association, among other institutions. Her articles have received eight best-paper awards from the American Sociological Association and the Society for the Study of Social Problems.