Suchergebnisse

Biopolis is the major life sciences investment by Singapore to become a global player in a new knowledge economy, as well as a promissory construction, a future-oriented emergent form of life constituted by and constitutive of a series of ethical plateaus or terrains of decision-making under entrepreneurial, policy and scientific conditions of risk and inadequate knowledge. Singapore's Biopolis partakes in general cultural shifts towards biological and ecological sensibilities as responses to fears of pandemics, climate change, destruction of biodiversity, and toxicities produced by industrial agriculture and manufacturing. The issue is learning about biorepair mechanisms and creating new ecologies of knowledge involving not only interest in infectious or chronic diseases but also stem and iPS cells, cancers and regenerative medicine. Using the Genome Institute of Singapore's first ten years as a partial focus, this article suggests metrics of success (beyond merely money, jobs, patents) which lie in three arenas: infectious diseases, cross-national science diplomacy and regenerative medicine. In October 2010, Biopolis underwent a sudden shift towards 'industrial alignment', raising ethical questions about the nature of future biologies, bioeconomies and bioecologies that have been spliced into the messenger RNA of different social networks and technical platforms of emergent twenty-first century biological sensibilities.

Twelve cartoons, published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005, nine cartoons published in the Tehran newspaper Iran in May 2006, and 282 cartoons curated in Tehran in September 2006 provide a useful case study in the experimentation with new and old media in the transnational circuitry.
At stake are the agons, polemos (Greek terms of reference), or luti-jahel-darvish, "Karbala paradigm," and jumhuri-ye moral struggles (Persian terms of reference) in Iran and the West over creating and protecting robust public spheres and civil societies. Four perspectives are probed: cultural politics; cultural media histories; the emotional excess (jouissance, petit à) of cultural politics; and the deep play mode of aesthetic judgement formed between the practical and ethical, between political economy and expressive art (including political drama), and between individual self-fashioning on the one hand, and on the other hand changing symbolic and social orders.

Three forms of narrative heuristics are identified and explored in the search for political inclusiveness, robustness, and legitimacy: (1) environmental topics: toxics and the need for second-order or reflexive institutions of modernization; water and the need for getting beyond zero-sum games; urban public goods and infrastructures; medical services and distributed care; animals and biodiversity and the need to pay attention to feedback that signals our inability to achieve perfect control and hence dependence on one another; (2) perspectival topoi: single-eyed stories of identity, ownership, interest, and mastery; double-voiced stories of mutual recognition, sub-versions, and alternative realities; and triangulated stories of polyvocal, interactive, risk-taking experimentalism; (3) processual narratives of structural transformation: political economies (agrarian, industrial, and postindustrial), second-order modernization and biopolitical forms of governance from societies of discipline to societies of control or regulation (by codes, flows, distributed feedback, desubjugated knowledges, and capillaries of micropower); ecological feedback systems ; and new grammars of multitude or modes of enhanced self-organized civil society coordination that can either work around governments and bureaucracies or can create public spheres from which to address and pressure government.1

The archive is the place for the storage of documents and records. With the emergence of the modern state, it became the storehouse for the material from which national memories were constructed. Archives also housed the proliferation of files and case histories as populations were subjected to disciplinary power and surveillance. Behind all scholarly research stands the archive. The ultimate plausibility of a piece of research depends on the grounds, the sources, from which the account is extracted and compiled. An expanding and unstable globalizing archive presents particular problems for classifying and legitimating knowledge. Increasingly the boundaries between the archive and everyday life become blurred through digital recording and storage technologies. Not only does the volume of recordable archive material increase dramatically (e.g. the Internet), but the volume of material seen worthy of archiving increases too, as the criteria of what can, or should be, archived expands. Life increasingly becomes lived in the shadow of the archive.

▪ Abstract  Anthropologies of late modernity (also called postmodernity, postindustrial society, knowledge society, or information society) provide a number of stimulating challenges for all levels of social, cultural, and psychological theory, as well as for ethnographic and other genres of anthropological writing. Three key overlapping arenas of attention are the centrality of science and technology; decolonization, postcolonialism, and the reconstruction of societies after social trauma; and the role of the new electronic and visual media. The most important challenges of contemporary ethnographic practice include more than merely (a) the techniques of multilocale or multisited ethnography for strategically accessing different points in broadly spread processes, (b) the techniques of multivocal or multiaudience-addressed texts for mapping and acknowledging with greater precision the situatedness of knowledge, (c) the reworking of traditional notions of comparative work for a world that is increasingly aware of difference, and (d) acknowledging that anthropological representations are interventions within a stream of representations, mediations, and unequally inflected discourses competing for hegemonic control. Of equal importance are the challenges of juxtaposing, complementing, or supplementing other genres of writing, working with historians, literary theorists, media critics, novelists, investigative or in-depth journalists, writers of insider accounts (e.g. autobiographers, scientists writing for the public), photographers and film makers, and others.

In this excerpt from a series of seminars on knowledge generation in the arts, the sciences, and the humanities, scholars of philosophy, history, and anthropology eaplore the meaning of collaboration in their respective fields. The seminars, held at the Smithsonian Institution during 1991, compared the goals, techniques, and myths of creative and scholarly collaboration.

In a conversation format, seven anthropologists with extensive expertise in new digital technologies, intellectual property, and journal publishing discuss issues related to open access, the anthropology of information circulation, and the future of scholarly societies. Among the topics discussed are current anthropological research on open source and open access; the effects of open access on traditional anthropological topics; the creation of community archives and new networking tools; potentially transformative uses of field notes and materials in new digital ecologies; the American Anthropological Association's recent history with these issues, from the development of AnthroSource to its new publishing arrangement with Wiley-Blackwell; and the political economies of knowledge circulation more generally.