From Experimental Systems to Experimental States: Anthropology at the Intersection of Life, Science and Capital, University of California, March 2007

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

This is a proposal for partial support for a two-day conference to be hosted at the University of California at Irvine in March 2007, leading to publication of an edited volume. The anthropology of the life sciences is a growing field at the intersection of the anthropology of science, the anthropology of medicine, and science and technology studies. "Biopolitics," Foucault's term for the way modernity puts life at the explicit center of political calculation, often serves as a challenging analytic focus for this work. At the same time, biopolitics seems to prevent attention to the laboratory practices of science and to the corporate forms of capital. The proposed conference responds to this problem by attending equally to experimental forms of life in the laboratory (especially information sciences and molecular biology), and to work on the state, as an agent that both sets the legal and institutional possibilities and constraints for scientific experimentation, and one that is in itself, experimenting with its own form. In order to prepare for this conference, Sunder Rajan hosted two successful workshops (in 2004 and 2005) at UCI, under the rubric of "Lively Capital" focusing on "Biotechnologies, Ethics and Governance in Global Markets," and on "Techno-Corporate Critique and Ethnographic Method." These resulted in new research questions at the limit of the anthropology of science and technology, namely the necessity of simultaneously studying the state and corporations. These discussions led to a volume (in preparation) and to the formulation of a series of methodological topical questions around the concept of experimentation. Building on Hans-Jorg Rheinberger's work on "experimental systems" as a productive process of continuous stabilization and destabilization, this conference extends it as a focal point relevant to the operation of the state, law, regulatory agencies and political mechanisms. This conference thus brings together junior and senior anthropologists of science and technology together with key anthropologists, philosophers, political scientists, computer scientists, and historians of the life sciences in order to juxtapose science and the state as sites and agents of experimentation, in order to look simultaneously at micro-processes of experimentation within laboratories, and at the macro-level regulation and instantiation of experimental regimes. The Intellectual Merit of this project consists in its defining a new dimension of the anthropology of the life sciences through creating an interdisciplinary conversation across many fields, and comparative projects spanning 21 different countries. The PI ran two successful workshops as precursors in order to clearly define the scope, goals, and format of the conference and subsequent volume. The Broader Impact of this project involves the promotion of junior scholars through a conference in which their work is discussed in conversation with leading scholars. In addition, women represent over 50% of the invited participants. As with the workshops, the conference will include graduate students and funding from other sources will be raised to enable their attendance. The results of the conference will be collected into an edited book with significant cross-disciplinary appeal filling a need for a new understanding of states as experimental systems. The organizers are experienced editors and fund-raisers.