Dr Katharine Dow
About
About
Dr Katharine (Katie) Dow works at the Environment Agency, where she leads social science research on net zero. She is also currently a collaborator on the ARIA-funded Futuring Biological Commons project. Katie holds a PhD in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics. Previously, Katie was an ESRC-funded postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Anthropology, University of Edinburgh. She was subsequently a Senior Research Associate and Deputy Director of the Reproductive Sociology Research Group (ReproSoc) at the University of Cambridge. During this time, she worked on two Wellcome-funded projects. In the first, she studied media representations of the history of IVF and in the second, she led a work package centred on links between environmental and reproductive concerns and activism. She was a visiting fellow at the University of Copenhagen, 2022-2023 and was an academic fellow with the Scottish Parliament, 2024-2025. In addition to academic roles, Katie has worked for charities and in the UK Parliament and in consultancy roles with clients including UN agencies and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics.
Research interests
Katie specialises in qualitative research and discourse analysis in the UK. Her expertise spans public perceptions and discourses around science, technology and medicine; environmental activism, climate change and multispecies ethnography; and reproduction, parenting and intergenerational relations. At a theoretical level, Katie is fascinated by conceptions of nature and naturalness, the figure of the child and imaginaries of the future and is deeply motivated by understanding multiple and intersecting forms of injustice and inequality.
Key publications
Dow, Katharine. 2025. ‘Squished Strawberries: Saving Seeds and Growing Community in a Hostile Environment’. Cambridge Journal of Anthropology 43 (2): 51–67 doi:10.3167/cja.2025.430205
McMullen, Heather, Katharine Dow and Alexandra Lakind. 2025. ‘A Crude, Cruel Crisis: The Fossil Family and Reproductive Impasse during Climate Change’. Environmental Humanities 17(2): 430-448.
Dow, Katharine. 2025. ‘Heterotopian Ecologies of Abundance: Saving Seeds and (Bio)Diversity in London. In The New Reproductive Order: Technology, Fertility, and Social Change around the Globe, eds. Sarah Franklin and Marcia Inhorn. NYU Press.
Doyle, Sophia and Katharine Dow. 2024. ‘“Saving the Knowledge Helps to Save the Seed”: Generating a Collaborative Seed Data Project in London’. In Digital Ecologies, eds. Jonathon Turnbull, Henry Anderson-Elliott, Adam Searle and Eva Giraud. Manchester University Press.
Dow, Katharine and Julieta Chaparro Buitrago. 2023. ‘Towards Environmental Reproductive Justice’. Invited chapter in A Companion to the Anthropology of Reproductive Medicine and Technology, eds. Cecilia C. Van Hollen and Nayantara Sheoran Appleton. Routledge
Boydell, Victoria and Katharine Dow (eds.). 2022. Technologies of Reproduction Across the Lifecourse: Expanding Reproductive Studies. Emerald Books.
Dow, Katharine. 2021. ‘Bloody Marvels: Resituating Seeds in Intergenerational Ethnography and Theory’. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 35(4): 493-510.
Boydell, Victoria and Katharine Dow. 2021. ‘Adjusting the Analytical Aperture: Propositions for an integrated approach to the social study of reproductive technologies.’ BioSocieties, published online August 2021.
Dow, Katharine and Janelle Lamoreaux. 2020. ‘Situated Kinmaking and the Population “Problem”’, Environmental Humanities 12(2): 475-491.
Dow, Katharine. 2019. ‘Looking into the Test-Tube: The Birth of IVF on British Television’, Medical History 63(2): 189-208.
Dow, Katharine. 2018. ‘“Now She’s Just an Ordinary Baby”: The Birth of IVF in the British Press’. Sociology, Published Online First 22nd February 2018.
Dow, Katharine and Victoria Boydell (eds.). 2018. Nature and Ethics Across Geographical, Rhetorical and Human Borders. London: Routledge.
Dow, Katharine. 2017. ‘“The Men who made the Breakthrough”: How the British Press Represented Patrick Steptoe and Robert Edwards in 1978’, Reproductive Biomedicine and Society Online 4: 59-67.
Dow, Katharine. 2016. Making a Good Life: An Ethnography of Nature, Ethics, and Reproduction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Dow, Katharine. 2016. ‘What Gets Left Behind for Future Generations? Reproduction and the Environment in Spey Bay, Scotland’, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 22(3): 653-669.
Recent media and reports
Dow, Katharine. 2025. Links between Climate Change and Health in Scotland. Scottish Parliament Briefing.
Dow, Katharine. 2025. Public perceptions of net zero technologies: social science research and evidence. Environment Agency.
“Environmental Reproductive Justice” with Katie Dow and Julieta Chaparro-Buitrago, Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene podcast, 2024