Neoliberalising technoscience and environment: EU policy for competitive, sustainable biofuels

This chapter discusses how EU biofuels policy: stimulates new markets for knowledge as well as resources; assumes that markets drive beneficent innovation; and thus deepens links between markets, technoscience and environment. The theoretical concept ‘neoliberalising the environment’ is extended to links between technoscience and natural resources

Thinking Fragments: Adisciplinary Reflections on Feminisms and Environmental Justic

Feminisms and environmental justice are some of the names of struggles to understand nature-culture linkages and conceptualize just worlds for non-humans and their human kin. In this paper, I revisit my journey of doing environmental justice research, i.e. of my feminist scientific practice in Asia and Latin America. In this retrospective telling I highlight how gender, political economy, and race were and remain fundamental in producing the subjects and objects of my research and analysis. I discuss how an implicit feminism helped me grapply with the complex nature-culture linkages I observed in the field. Postcolonial and marxist insights supplement and complement feminisms in the questions I pose as we attempt to imagine new nature-cultures

The genome incorporated: constructing biodigital identity

The Genome Incorporated examines the proliferation of human genomics across contemporary media cultures. It explores questions about what it means for a technoscience to thoroughly saturate everyday life, and places the interrogation of the science/media relationship at the heart of this enquiry. The book develops a number of case studies in the mediation and consumption of genomics, including: the emergence of new direct-to-the-consumer bioinformatics companies; the mundane propagation of testing and genetic information through lifestyle television programming; and public and private engagements with art and science institutions and events. Through these novel sites, this book examines the proliferating circuits of production and consumption of genetic information and theorizes this as a process of incorporation. Its wide-ranging case studies ensure its appeal to readers across the social sciences

Cripping Feminist Technoscience

In feminist technoscience studies (FTS), the term technoscience conveys that scientific knowledge and technological worlds are active constructions of entangled material, social, and historical agents. Feminist analyses of assisted reproduction, environmental harm, digital media, and cyborg bodies constitute some of the work of FTS, a close sibling of the new materialisms and post-positivist feminist philosophies of science. Technoscience is also a familiar object of inquiry for scholars of critical disability studies (DS). DS’s historical, sociological, and philosophical engagements with medicine, the politics of design, selective reproduction, fictional cyborgs, and technology users make clear that DS and FTS scholars share at least some understandings of technoscience. However, while feminist disability studies has emerged as a field containing hybrid developments and reciprocal critical exchanges between feminist and disability theories of embodiment, knowledge, and ethics (Garland-Thomson 2011; Tremain 2013), a field of feminist disability technoscience studies is only on the cusp of emergence

Epidemic space

The aim of this article is to highlight the importance of 'spatiality' in understanding the materialization of risk society and cultivation of risk sensibilities. More specifically it provides a cultural analysis of pathogen virulence (as a social phenomenon) by means of tracing and mapping the spatial flows that operate in the uncharted zones between the microphysics of infection and the macrophysics of epidemics. It will be argued that epidemic space consists of three types of forces: the vector, the index and the vortex. It will draw on Latour's Actor Network Theory to argue that epidemic space is geared towards instability when the vortex (of expanding associations and concerns) displaces the index (of finding a single cause)

Precision Targets: GPS and the Militarization of U.S. Consumer Identity

For most people in the United States, war is almost always elsewhere. Since the Civil War, declared wars have been engaged on terrains at a distance from the continental space of the nation. Until the attacks on the World Trade towers and the Pentagon in September 2001, many people in the United States perceived war to be conflicts between the standing armies of nation-states conducted at least a border—if not oceans and continents—away. Even the attacks of September 11 were localized in such a way as to feel as remote as they were immediate—watching cable news from elsewhere in the country, most U.S. residents were brought close to scenes of destruction and death by the media rather than by direct experience. Thus, in the United States, we could be said to be "consumers" of war, since our gaze is almost always fixed on representations of war that come from places perceived to be remote from the heartland

Introduction : biofutures/biopresents

Two very different reports produced for the UK government in the last three years have connected the state of our physical health with that of our material wealth. The first of these was produced in 2003 by the Bioscience Innovation and Growth Team (BIGT) titled Improving National Health, Improving National Wealth, whilst the second, called Health Inequalities-Status Report on the Programme for Action, was produced in 2005 by the Department of Health (DH).1 The former produced a series of recommendations designed to 'secure' the economic position of the UK bioscience industry and through this the health of the UK population, whilst the latter repeated the finding that socio-economic status and physical health are strongly related, revealing significant spatial and social health inequalities across the UK (see Batty, 2005; Shaw et al., 2005). These different understandings of the health-wealth link provide a useful foil to explore the central focus of this special issue, namely the construction and definition of particular problems and their solutions encompassing the technoscience of new genetics. Here the popular term technoscience is used to denote a technological context that promotes and maintains forms of scientific enquiry and understanding particular to that set of artefacts: in its simplest formulation, it posits that technology is both shaped by and shapes society. In this special issue we seek to explore the specific technoscientific context in which the biosciences-molecular biology, genetics, genomics, proteomics-are situated and subsequently promulgated: their biopresents and their biofutures. Using the government reports above to illustrate the context of the biosciences reveals two very different approaches to understanding national healthcare. The BIGT report implies that our health is dependent upon ensuring future industrial performance through building 'a mutually advantageous collaboration between the NHS and industry for patient benefit' (2003, p. 5). In contrast, the DH report implies that our health is dependent upon existing resource distribution with the government response, according to Shaw et al. (2005), consisting of an 'individualistic rhetoric of behavioural prevention [of illness]' as opposed to building 'mutually advantageous' alliances between different institutions. This is exemplified in the DH proposal for 'health trainers' for deprived areas which Caroline Flint MP, Minister for Public Health, says would assist people in adopting 'a healthier way of life' (quoted in Batty, 2005). Other wide-ranging changes to the UK health service have also been oriented towards promoting such an agenda based on personal choice, healthier lifestyles and medical innovations derived from modern biotechnology (i.e. targeted at individuals). Furthermore, this agenda has been supported by the extension of privatized provision of services across the NHS [see Pollock (2004) for a critical review]