Professor Bledsoe’s studies have centered on cultural visions of reproduction and the lifecourse in West Africa and beyond.  Specific themes have included marriage, fertility, child fosterage, health, contraception, aging, obstetrics, and migration.  Several West African studies have been followed by U.S. and European counterparts. 

Conceptually, the work has examined forms of ideation, regulation, and quantitative calculus as ethnographic terrain.  It asks, among other things, (a) the politics of knowledge and the law, and (b) how formal perspectives usually attributed to demography, economics, and medicine can be combined with the softer social sciences to probe the dynamics that shape life events and to derive insights into the mutual cultural construction of nature and science.