Tactical Biopolitics

Tactical Biopolitics
Author: Beatriz Da Costa
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 535
Release: 2010-08-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262514915
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Scientists, scholars, and artists consider the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences. Popular culture in this “biological century” seems to feed on proliferating fears, anxieties, and hopes around the life sciences at a time when such basic concepts as scientific truth, race and gender identity, and the human itself are destabilized in the public eye. Tactical Biopolitics suggests that the political challenges at the intersection of life, science, and art are best addressed through a combination of artistic intervention, critical theorizing, and reflective practices. Transcending disciplinary boundaries, contributions to this volume focus on the political significance of recent advances in the biological sciences and explore the possibility of public participation in scientific discourse, drawing on research and practice in art, biology, critical theory, anthropology, and cultural studies. After framing the subject in terms of both biology and art, Tactical Biopolitics discusses such topics as race and genetics (with contributions from leading biologists Richard Lewontin and Richard Levins); feminist bioscience; the politics of scientific expertise; bioart and the public sphere (with an essay by artist Claire Pentecost); activism and public health (with an essay by Treatment Action Group co-founder Mark Harrington); biosecurity after 9/11 (with essays by artists' collective Critical Art Ensemble and anthropologist Paul Rabinow); and human-animal interaction (with a framing essay by cultural theorist Donna Haraway). Contributors Gaymon Bennett, Larry Carbone, Karen Cardozo, Gary Cass, Beatriz da Costa, Oron Catts, Gabriella Coleman, Critical Art Ensemble, Gwen D'Arcangelis, Troy Duster, Donna Haraway, Mark Harrington, Jens Hauser, Kathy High, Fatimah Jackson, Gwyneth Jones, Jonathan King, Richard Levins, Richard Lewontin, Rachel Mayeri, Sherie McDonald, Claire Pentecost, Kavita Philip, Paul Rabinow, Banu Subramanian, subRosa, Abha Sur, Samir Sur, Jacqueline Stevens, Eugene Thacker, Paul Vanouse, Ionat Zurr

Transformed States

Transformed States
Author: Martin Halliwell
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
Total Pages: 252
Release: 2024-11-15
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1978817886
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Transformed States offers a timely history of the politics, ethics, medical applications, and cultural representations of the biotechnological revolution, from the Human Genome Project to the COVID-19 pandemic. In exploring the entanglements of mental and physical health in an age of biotechnology, it views the post–Cold War 1990s as the horizon for understanding the intersection of technoscience and culture in the early twenty-first century. The book draws on original research spanning the presidencies of George H. W. Bush and Joe Biden to show how the politics of science and technology shape the medical uses of biotechnology. Some of these technologies reveal fierce ideological conflicts in the arenas of cloning, reproduction, artificial intelligence, longevity, gender affirmation, vaccination and environmental health. Interweaving politics and culture, the book illustrates how these health issues are reflected in and challenged by literary and cinematic texts, from Oryx and Crake to Annihilation, and from Gattaca to Avatar. By assessing the complex relationship between federal politics and the biomedical industry, Transformed States develops an ecological approach to public health that moves beyond tensions between state governance and private enterprise. To that end, Martin Halliwell analyzes thirty years that radically transformed American science, medicine, and policy, positioning biotechnology in dialogue with fears and fantasies about an emerging future in which health is ever more contested. Along with the two earlier books, Therapeutic Revolutions (2013) and Voices of Mental Health (2017), Transformed States is the final volume of a landmark cultural and intellectual history of mental health in the United States, journeying from the combat zones of World War II to the global emergency of COVID-19.

Biological Relatives

Biological Relatives
Author: Sarah Franklin
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 375
Release: 2013-11-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0822378256
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Thirty-five years after its initial success as a form of technologically assisted human reproduction, and five million miracle babies later, in vitro fertilization (IVF) has become a routine procedure worldwide. In Biological Relatives, Sarah Franklin explores how the normalization of IVF has changed how both technology and biology are understood. Drawing on anthropology, feminist theory, and science studies, Franklin charts the evolution of IVF from an experimental research technique into a global technological platform used for a wide variety of applications, including genetic diagnosis, livestock breeding, cloning, and stem cell research. She contends that despite its ubiquity, IVF remains a highly paradoxical technology that confirms the relative and contingent nature of biology while creating new biological relatives. Using IVF as a lens, Franklin presents a bold and lucid thesis linking technologies of gender and sex to reproductive biomedicine, contemporary bioinnovation, and the future of kinship.

Biopolitical Screens

Biopolitical Screens
Author: Pasi Valiaho
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 203
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0262548976
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An investigation of the aesthetics and politics of new visual media under twenty-first-century capitalism, from console games to virtual reality to video installation art. In Biopolitical Screens, Pasi Väliaho charts and conceptualizes the imagery that composes our affective and conceptual reality under twenty-first-century capitalism. Väliaho investigates the role screen media play in the networks that today harness human minds and bodies—the ways that images animated on console game platforms, virtual reality technologies, and computer screens capture human potential by plugging it into arrangements of finance, war, and the consumption of entertainment. Drawing on current neuroscience and political and economic thought, Väliaho argues that these images work to shape the atomistic individuals who populate the neoliberal world of accumulation and war. Väliaho bases his argument on a broad notion of the image as something both visible and sayable, detectable in various screen platforms but also in scientific perception and theoretical ideas. After laying out the conceptual foundations of the book, Väliaho offers focused and detailed investigations of the current visual economy. He considers the imagery of first-person shooter video games as tools of “neuropower”; explores the design and construction of virtual reality technologies to treat post-traumatic stress disorder in veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan; and examines three instances of video installation art that have the power to disrupt the dominant regime of sensibility rather than reinforce it.

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History

The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History
Author: Kathryn Brown
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 525
Release: 2020-04-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0429999143
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The Routledge Companion to Digital Humanities and Art History offers a broad survey of cutting-edge intersections between digital technologies and the study of art history, museum practices, and cultural heritage. The volume focuses not only on new computational tools that have been developed for the study of artworks and their histories but also debates the disciplinary opportunities and challenges that have emerged in response to the use of digital resources and methodologies. Chapters cover a wide range of technical and conceptual themes that define the current state of the field and outline strategies for future development. This book offers a timely perspective on trans-disciplinary developments that are reshaping art historical research, conservation, and teaching. This book will be of interest to scholars in art history, historical theory, method and historiography, and research methods in education.

Beatriz da Costa

Beatriz da Costa
Author: Daniela Lieja Quintanar
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 263
Release: 2024-09-24
Genre: Art
ISBN: 0262549484
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A long overdue look at the artistic investigations of the late artist Beatriz da Costa, revealing the depth and prescience of her work. Beatriz da Costa: (un)disciplinary tactics is the most comprehensive documentation and analysis to date of late artist Beatriz da Costa’s (1974–2012) groundbreaking work. As a retrospective of a brilliant young artist, it renders a social portrait of her artistic practice by both contextualizing the work in its historical period (late 1990s to early 2010s) and extending the work’s socio-political concerns to the present. The book, edited by Daniela Lieja Quintanar, features a collection of essays by curators, artists, and researchers from a variety of fields, including technoscience, tactical media, cancer research, environmental justice, performance art, and participatory art. It also includes a group of reflections written by former collaborators and close friends. Beginning with da Costa’s early projects in the late 1990s as a student in the arts and robotics at Carnegie Mellon University, the book surveys her collaborative work with collectives Critical Art Ensemble and Preemptive Media, as well as her research-based and large-scale installations made in the early 2000s. The publication is a faithful record of da Costa’s entire oeuvre, including information about artworks she left incomplete due to financial, health, or time limitations. Additionally, the book includes da Costa’s own critical writing on art and politics, as well as self-authored descriptions of her own work and an unflinching interview with cancer researcher Robert Schneider, who was a fundamental figure for da Costa at the end of her young life. The book accompanies a solo exhibition at LACE (Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions) as part of the Getty’s PST ART: Art & Science Collide initiative.

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research

The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Research
Author: Norman K. Denzin
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Total Pages: 1224
Release: 2017-01-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1506365442
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The substantially updated and revised Fifth Edition of this landmark handbook presents the state-of-the-art theory and practice of qualitative inquiry. Representing top scholars from around the world, the editors and contributors continue the tradition of synthesizing existing literature, defining the present, and shaping the future of qualitative research. The Fifth Edition contains 19 new chapters, with 16 revised—making it virtually a new volume—while retaining six classic chapters from previous editions. New contributors to this edition include Jamel K. Donnor and Gloria Ladson-Billings; Margaret Kovach; Paula Saukko; Bryant Keith Alexander; Thomas A. Schwandt and Emily F. Gates; Johnny Saldaña; Uwe Flick; Mirka Koro-Ljungberg, Maggie MacLure, and Jasmine Ulmer; Maria Elena Torre, Brett G. Stoudt, Einat Manoff, and Michelle Fine; Jack Bratich; Svend Brinkmann; Eric Margolis and Renu Zunjarwad; Annette N. Markham; Alecia Y. Jackson and Lisa A. Mazzei; Jonathan Wyatt, Ken Gale, Susanne Gannon, and Bronwyn Davies; Janice Morse; Peter Dahler-Larsen; Marc Spooner; and David A. Westbrook.

Breaching Borders

Breaching Borders
Author: Juliet Steyn
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2014-06-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0857736035
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As migration is described as a problem, mobility is seen as a goal. In a 'Europe without Borders', a place that prides itself on multiculturalism while struggling with racism, two opposing paradigms characterise contemporary discussions surrounding migrants. Breaching Borders: Art, Migrants and the Metaphor of Waste aims to interrogate the familiar debates, evolving new textual and interdisciplinary approaches to European cultural policies and unmasking the assumptions of the essentialist identity politics that go undeclared at the borders of cultural discourse. Twelve leading figures in post-colonial and translation studies, political philosophy, art, radical aesthetics, policy-making and sociology, reflect on the political and cultural meanings of migration; their arguments framed by artworks that provide glimpses of cross-cultural encounters. Essays - including a meditation on "wasted lives" by internationally renowned academic Zygmunt Bauman - explore the challenges of migration, history and integration and attempt to develop radical new figurations of migrant identity, underlining the necessity of an imaginative reach towards "The Other". This book brings together the roles of translation and of art in the central metaphor of waste - the trail of rubbish left behind by mechanisms of mobility; the excised narratives of wasted identities and people.

Technics Improvised

Technics Improvised
Author: Timothy Murray
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 269
Release: 2022-02-22
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1452967040
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Seeing new media art as an entry point for better understanding of technology and worldmaking futures In this challenging work, a leading authority on new media art examines that curatorial and aesthetic landscape to explore how art resists and rewires the political and economic structures that govern technology. How do inventive combinations of artistic and theoretical improvisation counter the extent to which media art remains at risk, not just from the quarantines of a global pandemic but also from the very viral and material conditions of technology? How does global media art speak back to the corporate closures of digital euphoria as clothed in strategies of digital surveillance, ecological deprivation, and planned obsolescence? In Technics Improvised, Timothy Murray asks these questions and more. At the intersection of global media art, curatorial practice, tactical media, and philosophy, Murray reads a wide range of creative performances and critical texts that envelop artistic and digital materials in unstable, political relations of touch, body, archive, exhibition, and technology. From video to net art and interactive performance, he considers both canonical and unheralded examples of activist technics that disturb the hegemony of biopolitical/digital networks by staging the very touch of the unsettling discourse erupting from within. In the process, critical dialogues emerge between a wide range of artists and theorists, from Hito Steyerl, Ricardo Dominguez, Joan Jonas, Isaac Julien, Ryoji Ikeda, and Shadi Nazarian to Gilles Deleuze, Jean-Luc Nancy, Elizabeth Povinelli, Jean-François Lyotard, Erin Manning, Achille Mbembe, and Samuel Weber. Brilliantly conceived and argued and eloquently written, Technics Improvised points the way to how artistic and theoretical practice can seize on the improvisational accidents of technics to activate creativity, thought, and politics anew.

The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law

The Cambridge Companion to Human Rights Law
Author: Conor Gearty
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2012-11-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 110701624X
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Captures the essence of the multi-layered subject of human rights law in a way that is authoritative, critical and scholarly.