Conference Agenda

Reproductive experiences are deeply shaped by stigma, legislation, and intense emotional dimensions (Mohammadi 2016; Lusi et al. 2024; Stangl et al. 2013). These experiences are navigated within healthcare infrastructures that often prioritize standardized protocols over lived experience (Naghdali 2025; Ross 2020). As a result, dominant representations of reproductive health rely on sanitized and medicalized narratives that flatten complexity, reinforce normative reproductive timelines (Kessler 2008), and marginalize experiences that fall outside idealized notions of healthy or “normal” bodies. Structural barriers, delays in care, and persistent stigma erode trust in healthcare infrastructures and medical advice, as disclosure itself can feel emotionally risky (Fox 2025). Consequently, much of what is lived, felt, and negotiated remains difficult to articulate within existing representational frameworks (Dubriwny 2012). 

This 90-minute exploration adopts a speculative and performative approach, using dolls as material and symbolic media through which reproductive health experiences can be explored, deconstructed, and reimagined through play. Doll-based methods have been framed as design practices of perspective- and role-taking, facilitating empathetic engagement (Jakobsen, 2012). Indeed, Persona Dolls have been used in participatory and educational settings as culturally situated figures to support inclusion and challenge discrimination (Wilkinson & Wilkinson, 2022). Dolls help participants adopt users’ perspectives and explore scenarios during early ideation (Kagohashi et al., 2020). In therapeutic contexts, dolls support expression through play and making, offering material ways to articulate experiences that may be difficult to verbalize (Krystyniak, 2020).  

At DRS 2026, we invite participants to hack dolls to explore and represent reproductive health experiences, including menstruation, endometriosis, pregnancy, abortion, postpartum, menopause, and many more—across both first-person experiences and those encountered as loved ones or caregivers. We will provide second-hand dolls, props and craft materials, to support sketching, annotation, and reflective note-taking throughout the session. Participants will be invited to use the props to hack the dolls bodies and imagine, or stage interactions to explore bodily change, complications, care practices, unpredictability. We explore how hacking dolls can surface and document reproductive health experiences that resist articulation within dominant biomedical and service representations, extending prior workshops in reproductive health (Ahmed et al. 2025, Gamboa 2024, Hansson 2023, Kumar 2019, Lusi et al. 2024, Reime et al. 2022, Petterson 2025, Tuli 2025). We propose three interrelated thematic areas:  

• how reproductive health experiences such as pregnancy, abortion, surrogacy and more, unsettle the notion of a singular, bounded body, including the material, symbolic, and ethical implications of distributing risk across bodies.  
• how reproductive health stories are shaped collectively, for example in relationships with partners, families, and institutions.  
• how reproductive health experiences might intersect with other health conditions such as chronic illness and mental health, reflecting on bodily and psychological experiences that both shape and are shaped by reproductive health.