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Over the past decade ‘social egg freezing’ has emerged as a technology of hope that purports to empower women by enabling them to continue their careers or find the right partner without the fear of jeopardising their fertility. This technology has been promoted and celebrated by fertility companies, bioethicists, clinicians, and multi-national corporations such as Apple and Facebook. While critical questions have been raised, they tend to focus on ethical and legal issues, such as informed consent and patient autonomy. This paper uses Foucault’s notion ofdispositifas analytic lens to examine the entanglement of the commercial arrangements of fertility companies, the discursive use of hope in promoting these services, and effects on professional medical care. Drawing on socio-political analyses of hope, this paper examines the potential financial conflicts of interest facing clinicians and the way discourses of hope might mask problematic financial relations and lack of evidence of effectiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to interrogate the potential and challenges in interdisciplinary working across disciplinary boundaries by examining a longitudinal partnership designed to research student experiences of digital technologies in undergraduate medicine established by the authors of this paper (one from Education and the other from Medical Education). The paper is situated in current methodological trends including the changing value of replicability and evidence-based methods and increases in qualitative and mixed methods studies in medical education, whilst education research has seen growing encouragement for randomized controlled trials and large-scale quantitative studies. A critical analysis of the partnership interactions is framed by Holland’s positional and imagined identities, negotiated across ‘figured’ worlds and the concept of epistemic games that guide knowledge construction. We consider social, political and cultural challenges; and how ‘in-between’ sites of knowledge were established where the academic identity of each was shaped by engaging with the other and new theoretical, methodological and ethical understandings were co-constructed. The paper concludes that despite the ongoing challenges, ‘bottom-up’ partnerships can contribute to a growth in interdisciplinarity which might itself be understood as a boundary object. Interdisciplinarity necessitates improvisation and boundary crossing and can, therefore, always be considered a matter of negotiation, creativity and collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]