Contestational Science
Identifying the Sites of Struggle in the Life Sciences
This panel that introduces six key themes that we believe need further development and attention as they relate to resistant activity.
1. Biopiracy, the disappearing biological commons, and organic privatization. Capital has opened multiple fronts in the organic world to serve its neocolonization efforts. On the one hand, it plunders the natural resources of any nation incapable of maintaining a defensive border, while at the same time weakening the culture by destroying or fortifying common resources that had been collectively developed and held.
Speaker: Michael Dorsey
2. Bioinformatics. What results can we expect from the integration of organic and synthetic codes? How can this hybrid be used by capital for engineering the social, nature, and the body?
Speaker: Eugene Thacker
Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology. His book Biomedia will be published this year, and he also works with Biotech Hobbyist.
3. Food production. Transgenic production has changed the food industry into a more efficient weapon against autonomy on the individual, local, national, and global levels. Monsanto has openly claimed that its goal is to consolidate the world food supply. Once food production is in the hands of a few transnationals (which already control 40% of food production), what results will it have for the global and national political economy and for the environment? Speaker: Claire Pentecost
4. Tissue and organ production. Tracking the trans-national flow of patented stem-cell lines and protocols, human DNA, organs, and tissues has become a crucial issue for understanding who produces these exceptionally valuable products, who (and at what location) gets access to them, and the politics of use in research and on the open market.
Speaker: Irina Aristarkhova
Aristarkhova has published and lectured widely on cyberculture and cyberarts and critical issues in image processing; ethnicity and gender in cyberspace.
5. Reproductive rights. With the rebirth of positive eugenics in conjunction with crackdowns on control over one’s own body, what must be done to insure individual choice, and to not have it replaced by commodity choice in the service of capital?
Speaker: Women on Waves
A pro-abortion activist group that has rebuilt a boat as a floating abortion clinic, to circumvent national legislation in countries where abortion is illegal.
6. Drugs into bodies. As AIDS and other diseases ravage nations, classes, and ethnicities that are unable to meet the drug companies demands for profit, the question of drugs into bodies has tremendous immediacy and resonance. What can be done to bring people the drugs needed to survive, and how can pharmaceutical companies be pressured to alter policies that unshakably favor the needs of the world’s wealthiest people?
Speaker: David Barr,
Barr is an advocate for HIV treatment since 1987, former Staff Attorney for Lambda Legal Defense Fund, and Policy Director for the Gay Mens' Health Crisis. He was the Executive Director of the Forum for Collaborative HIV Research. He is currently a Consultant working with, among others, the Tides Foundation and Open Society Institute.
Moderation and Facilitation: Faith Wilding
II - Session Structure
Since panels are never an optimum way to present, we want to keep the presentations short. Eeach speaker will open with a 10 -minute statement, after which we turn the speaking platform over to the floor. The hope is that those coming to the session will arrive with as many tactical possibilities that can be presented during the session. For this second part we aim at keeping the discussion on a practical level.