Docile Bodies: Transnational Research Ethics as Biopolitics

This essay explores the claim that bioethics has become a mode of biopolitics. It seeks to illuminate one of the myriad of ways that bioethics joins other institutionalized discursive practices in the task of producing, organizing, and managing the bodies—of policing and controlling populations—in order to empower larger institutional agents. The focus of this analysis is the contemporary practice of transnational biomedical research. The analysis is catalyzed by the enormous transformation in the political economy of transnational research that has occurred over the past three decades and the accompanying increase in the numbers of human bodies now subjected to research. This essay uses the work of Michel Foucault, particularly his notion of docile bodies, to analyze these changes. Two loci from the bioethics literature are explored—one treating research in the United States and one treating research in developing countries. In the latter, we see a novel dynamic of the new biopolitics: the ways in which bioethics helps to create docile political bodies that will police themselves and who will, in turn, facilitate the production of docile human bodies for research

Nepali Domestic Workers in New Delhi: Strategies and Agency

Scholars have noted deplorable conditions of female migrant workers who suffer several types of citizenship disabilities as most countries do not extend equal citizenship rights and protections to migrant workers. In addition to this, they are unable to take full advantage of the rights available to them in the host countries because of low cultural and social capital. Further, studies have emphasized how the breakdown of the traditional economy and the penetration of the market in developing societies have forced people, especially from rural areas, to seek low-paying dead-end jobs in the global labor market. Examining Nepali domestic workers in New Delhi, while this research agrees with the existing studies, we also bring to notice the fact that migrant female workers are not always passive victims and that they exercise considerable choice and agency. The case of Nepali domestic workers in New Delhi offers fresh insight into the ways in which migrant women attempt to actively influence and control the work conditions and immediate labour market outcomes. This paper also shows that even if Nepali migrant workers gain in a limited way, they actively collude with their employers to marginalize native domestic workers. In the end, traditional power relations and inequality are reproduced unchallenged

And Power Corrupts…: Theology and the Disciplinary Matrix of Bioethics

What role should religion play in a religiously pluralistic liberal society? Public bioethics unavoidably raises this question in a particularly insistent fashion. As the 20 papers in this collection demonstrate, the issues are complex and multifaceted. The authors address specific and highly contested issues as assisted suicide, stem cell research, cloning, reproductive health, and alternative medicine as well as more general questions such as who legitimately speaks for religion in public bioethics, what religion can add to our understanding of justice, and the value of faith-based contributions to healthcare. Christian (Catholic and Protestant), Jewish, Islamic, and Buddhist viewpoints are represented. The first book to focus on the interface of religion and bioethics, this collection fills a significant void in the literature

Reading Foucault: Genealogy and Social Science Research Methodology and Ethics

Foucault's work has given rise to an increased methodological sensitivity of the political dangers associated with traditional qualitative approaches in the social sciences. There is a growing awareness that the widespread use of the research interview is not indicative of a deepening insight into the workings of culture, but is part of a broader social technology for its reproduction. In an effort to re-imagine interview methodology, scholars have read Foucault to suggest the need for greater attention to the active co-construction of research conclusions arising from interview based research. Specifically there are concerns that the authenticity of interviewee experience may be overwritten by the predispositions of the researcher. This paper questions this interpretation of Foucault's work and argues that Foucault rejects the view that knowledge emerges from the active social constructions of agents, but sees knowledge as an outcome, often accidental, of interrelated historical practices and discourses that produce the subjects and objects of social science discourse. The implications of Foucault's work for thinking about research ethics is not a return to authenticity, but a rejection of representational claims. The paper comprises a review of social science responses to post structural insights, coverage of the critical epistemological differences between Foucault's method and other key social theory paradigms, and a discussion of the critical ethical issues these differences raise for the social sciences.Social Sciences, Methodology, Research Ethics, Research Epistemology, Foucault, Qualitative Methodology

The Resources and strategies boys use to establish status in a junior school without competetive sport

The data in this paper comes from an ethnographically-based study of Year 6 (10-11 year old) boys in an English junior school. It investigates the resources and strategies used and created by the boys to classify themselves, and to construct and perform their masculinity in a tightly regulated school where competitive sport (including playground football) is prohibited for the majority of the school year. The paper considers the relationship between the formal school culture and informal pupil culture, and, in particular, the options open, limited and closed to the boys to construct their masculinities and establish status/prestige within their immediate peer-group. One option open was being able to work hard in class without peer reprovement, but despite the limitation of competitive games/sport, the most favoured form of masculine status was still exemplified by embodied forms of athleticism and physicality. The paper also explores another way of gaining status which was by a form of verbal abuse known as ‘cussing’: this was a pervasive and prevalent part of school life, and is viewed as another form of competitive, stylised, performance

Forever young: Childhoods, fairy tales and philosophy

Fairy tales play a substantial role in the shaping of childhoods. Developed into stories and played out in picture books, films and tales, they are powerful instruments that influence conceptions and treatments of the child and childhoods. This article argues that traditional fairy tales and contemporary stories derived from them use complex means to mould the ways that children live and experience their childhoods. This argument is illustrated through representations of childhoods and children in a selection of stories and an analysis of the ways they act on and produce the child subjects and childhoods they convey. The selected stories are examined through different philosophical lenses, utilizing Foucault, Lyotard and Rousseau. By problematizing these selected stories, the article analyses what lies beneath the surface of the obvious meanings of the text and enticing pictures in stories, as published or performed. Finally, this article argues for a careful recognition of the complexities of stories used in early childhood settings and their powerful and multifaceted influences on children and childhoods

Rethinking Gorkha Identity: Outside the Imperium of Discourse, Hegemony and History

Occasional Papers in Sociology and Anthropology - Peace and Democracy in South Asia, Volume 2, Numbers 1&2, 200

Exploring an absent presence: Wayfinding as an embodied sociocultural experience

Wayfinding has often been seen as being about the quickest or shortest possible route between two points (Hölscher et al 2011; Tam 2011; Haque et al 2006). Moreover, this process has very often been seen as a cognitive one, with the experiential nature of wayfinding and with the embodied, emotional and sociocultural aspects of this experience conspicuously absent. We argue that wayfinding is rarely a purely cognitive process that involves an individual person, who is entirely instrumental in navigating a direct and precise route, but instead that this is a process almost always directed according to embodied and sociocultural needs. We propose a reassessment of present wayfinding definitions and suggest an alternative understanding that includes sociocultural elements, embodied individuals and experience through their embodied senses, as crucial elements of the concept. Seeing wayfinding from this different sociocultural ontological viewpoint, opens up new ways of understanding and planning wayfinding systems

Digital Subjectivation and Financial Markets: Criticizing Social Studies of Finance with Lazzarato

The recently rising field of Critical Data Studies is still facing fundamental questions. Among these is the enigma of digital subjectivation. Who are the subjects of Big Data? A field where this question is particularly pressing is finance. Since the 1990s traders have been steadily integrated into computerized data assemblages, which calls for an ontology that eliminates the distinction between human sovereign subjects and non-human instrumental objects. The latter subjectivize traders in pre-conscious ways, because human consciousness runs too slow to follow the volatility of the market. In response to this conundrum Social Studies of Finance has drawn on Actor-Network Theory to interpret financial markets as technically constructed networks of human and non-human actors. I argue that in order to develop an explicitly critical data study it might be advantageous to refer to Maurizio Lazzarato’s theory of machinic subjugation instead. Although both accounts describe financial digital subjectivation similarly, Lazzarato has the advantage of coupling his description to a clear critique of and resistance to finance