Affective practices, care and bioscience: a study of two laboratories

Scientific knowledge-making is not just a matter of experiments, modelling and fieldwork. It also involves affective, embodied and material practices (Wetherell 2012) which can be understood together as 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2011). In this paper we explore how affect spans and connects material, subjective and organisational practices, focusing in particular on the patterns of care we encountered in an observational study of two bioscience laboratories. We explore the preferred emotional subjectivities of each lab and their relation to material practice. We go on to consider flows and clots in the circulation of affect and their relation to care through an exploration of belonging and humour in the labs. We show how being a successful scientist or group of researchers involves a careful choreography of affect in relation to materials, colleagues and others to produce scientific results, subjects and workplaces. We end by considering how thinking with care troubles dominant constructions of scientific practice, successful scientific selves and collectives

Violence and creation: the recovery of the body in the work of Elaine Scarry

Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain justly deserves it place as one the pivotal works that opened up the field of ‘body studies’. The text needs to be evaluated in the retrospective terms of the field it established, and also with respect to the changing status of both ‘torture’ and ‘war’ in contemporary state politics. Scarry’s analysis of the relationship between making and unmaking, tools and weapons, under-estimates the reversibility and the situated relational character of these processes and artefacts. The changing nature of modern conflict, and the rising concern with global terrorism rather than ‘conventional’ and ‘nuclear’ war, makes the ‘referential instability’ of the body difficult to recuperate in post-conflict discourse. At the same, the normalisation of the logic of torture in the contemporary governance of the bodies of the most vulnerable in society makes Scarry’s analysis all the more prescient

Caring for soil life in the Anthropocene: the role of attentiveness in more-than-human ethics

This paper considers the work that attentiveness can and can’t do in generating more ethical relations with non-humans. How to build better relations with non-humans has been a central debate in geography and cognate disciplines. These concerns include ethical relations with non-humans who both pervade and create liveable environments, such as soil biota. Scholars have specifically identified attentiveness as key in generating more-than-human ethics. However, how attentiveness may arise, and what work attentiveness may be able to do in generating ethical relations has not been sufficiently explored. Additionally, soils as relational materialities remain underexplored in social sciences. In this paper, I address these two important gaps in scholarship. Investigating the rising concern with soil biota in conventional English farming, I propose the care network as a way of conceptualising and investigating the ethical potential of attentiveness. As concerns grow about soil degradation, and the dangers this is posing to food production and to human survival, land managers are attending to soil ecosystems as part of caring for their farm businesses. While this attentiveness is producing some transformative effects, its potential is limited by the configuration of the soil care network. As long as soil care is configured primarily as a farmers’ concern, the potential of attentiveness in generating ethical regard to the needs of soil biota will be limited. In the conclusions, I suggest ways of expanding attentiveness to soils, and building a wider and practical relational ethic of soil care. I also argue we need more attention in geographic research to attentiveness and care as systemic, unequally distributed, and operating at multiple scales

Diagnosing dementia: Ethnography, interactional ethics and everyday moral reasoning

This article highlights the contribution of ethnography and qualitative sociology to the ethical challenges that frame the diagnosis of dementia. To illustrate this contribution, the paper draws on an ethnographic study of UK memory clinics carried out between 2012 and 2014. The ethnographic data, set alongside other studies and sociological theory, contest the promotion of a traditional view of autonomy; the limiting of the point of ethical interest to a distinct moment of diagnosis disclosure; and the failure to recognise risk and uncertainty in the building of clinical ‘facts’ and their communication. In addressing these specific concerns, this article contributes to the wider debate over the relationship between sociology and bioethics (medical ethics). At the heart of these debates lies more fundamental questions: how can we best understand and shape moral decision-making and ethics that guide behaviour in medical practice, and what should be the guiding ideas, concepts and methods to inform ethics in the clinic? Using the case of dementia diagnosis, this article illustrates the benefits of an ethnographic approach, not just for understanding this ethical problem but also for exploring if and how a more empirically informed ethics can help shape healthcare practices for the better

Control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability

This article discusses currently neglected distinctions between control, care, and conviviality in the politics of technology for sustainability. We conceptualize control as the ambition to maintain fictitious borders between hierarchically ordered categories such as subjects and objects. This ambition is materialized into a wide range of Modern technological innovations, including genome editing and deep sea mining. Contrasting with control, we conceptualize values of care that constitute socio-technical practices where connections are prioritized over categories and hierarchy is countered with egalitarian commitment. In caring practices, objects are thus treated as subjects, often within political contexts that are dominated by ambitions to control. Building on care, we explore hopes for conviviality as mutualistic autonomy and decolonial self-realization to orient plural socio-technical pathways for moving beyond Modernity. We argue that such pathways are crucial for democratic transformations to sustainability. We illustrate our concepts using two brief case studies of agricultural developments. The first case discusses the politics of control in agricultural biotechnologies in Belgium. The second case reports on care within rural people's coping strategies in a south Indian "green revolution" landscape laden with control. In conclusion, we emphasize the need to situate attempted materializations of control, care, and conviviality in specific historical junctures. Situated understandings of the interplay between control, care, and conviviality can help realize sustainability that does not reproduce the centralizing, control-driven logic of Modern technocratic development

5-Amino-6,7,8,9-Tetrahydrobenzo[b][1,8]Naphthyridin-2(1H)-One: The first Example of a new Family of HuperTacrines for Alzheimer's Disease Therapy

In this communication we have described the synthesis of 2-amino-6-oxo-1,6-dihydropyridine-3-carbonitrile (4), and the preparation of 5-amino-6,7,8,9-tetrahydrobenzo[b][1,8]naphthyridin-2(1H)-one (3 a), a non-hepatotoxic, antioxidant agent, showing moderate, but selective human acetylcholinesterase inhibition.JMC thanks MINECO (SAF2012-33304), and Universidad Camilo José Cela (MULTIMOL 2013–20) for supportPeer Reviewe