A Simpler Life: Synthetic Biological Experiments
Cornell University Press, 2021. 174 pages.
First, take a self-consciously self-aggrandizing area of bioengineering, “synthetic biology,” which was said to aim at nothing less than “the design and construction of novel life-forms” (Dan-Cohen, p.12), an apparently clear claim made by those with a platform from which to make it, one that is in …
In December 2019, reports emerged of a pneumonia of unknown origin in the city of Wuhan, China. A week into 2020, a novel pathogen was identified–– “severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2” (SARS-CoV-2), a new coronavirus. The novel virus is highly similar in structure and sequence to the first SARS coronavirus (2003). After entering the body, typically through the mucus …
Des Fitzgerald and Felicity Callard have recently offered some advice, a normative orientation even, for those engaging in collaboration:
…“Living well in a collaborative mode is about resisting the urge to sort things out – it is about quelling the desire to be clear, at all times, on who ‘I’ am, and what ‘I’ am doing, and whether or
In February 2011, Paul Rabinow, Gaymon Bennett and I began to reflect on the impasses we had experienced in our collaborative work with groups of bioscientists and other social scientists, which had begun in 2006 (Rabinow and Bennett 2012). The core concerns in our interconnected projects in collaboration were how ethical practice and human and bioscientific knowledge practices could best …
The Clinic and Elsewhere: Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy
by Todd Meyers
University of Washington Press, 2013
172 pp, US$25.00 (paperback)
The Clinic and Elsewhere is an extremely well-crafted account of the methodological, conceptual and narrative problems of knowledge and life of the afterlife of drug therapy. Todd Meyers gives expressive form to the attempt to cure, to …
The most recent edition of Cultural Anthropology is dedicated to Writing Culture as an episode in the history of anthropological thought. George Marcus (2012) provides one of two vistas of the relation of Writing Culture to experiments and experiences in anthropology today.
He writes in his abstract, “Fieldwork today requires a kind of collaborative concept work that …