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- Convenors:
-
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo
(Goldsmiths, University of London)
Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Sessions:
- Thursday 9 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The collection and analysis of bioinformation, or information that derives from biological life processes, increasingly shapes contemporary socialities. This panel takes bioinformation as an ethnographic lens to explore new interfaces between biology and anthropology.
Long Abstract:
The collection and analysis of bioinformation, or information that derives from biological life processes, increasingly shapes contemporary socialities. Bioinformation ontologies and infrastructures demand thinking through and against indeterminacy, multiplicity, interoperability and cooperation, as the orders they create deeply transform the answers biology can provide to anthropologists - and as concepts, theories and methods tied to bioinformation processing travel through and across worlds. Against this background, practices of bioinformation accession and aggregation from the colonial period to the digital age raises questions about the political structures that sustain fantasies of ‘total knowledge’, particularly in the aftermath of legacies of violence.
Thinking how life emerges and is made readable through bioinformation has taken anthropologists to confront technological spectres and yet to be realised potentialities of connection. This panel takes bioinformation as an ethnographic lens to explore new interfaces that emerge between biology and anthropology through the particular prism of data aggregation, computation and control. The panel proposes a cross-sectional approach to bring together case studies in synthetic biology, forensics, biotechnology, biosecurity and surveillance. The panel aims to connect these cases to address the question of biopolitics by interrogating bioinformation itself as an archive, that is, a sedimented substance in which agents, collectivities, structures and relations make, and transduce, social orders. Indeed, the analysis of bioinformation, as a ‘pattern that connects’ socialities and futures has not only enabled the extractive economies of the Anthropocene, but is promising a new world to come from a full rewriting of nature in the fast-approaching Plastocene.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 9 June, 2022, -Paper short abstract:
Focusing on the making of biodata in forensic collections and databases established in the aftermath of genocidal violence in Guatemala, this paper explores how forensic biomaterials, bioinformation and biodata are tied to processes that (re)biologize genocide and (re)naturalize race and gender.
Paper long abstract:
The creation of biorepositories and the generation of biodata are tied to future-oriented projects which seek to collect, index and govern forms of life. Whilst the rationales for such ventures are diverse, they are often grounded in liberal values and visions of progress that promise improved health, greater equity or justice. In medical and juridical contexts, for example, notions of improvement and change are entangled with moral positionalities and aspirations for genomic futures of deracialization and universal health which are predicated on knowledge derived from biomaterials. Forensic biorepositories established in the aftermath of atrocities provide an apt entry point into the making of biodata collections and the assumptions, logics and aspirations that underpin them. Biorepositories acquire visibility in public life in conjunction with immediate and long-term emergencies and are bound up with humanitarian logics and interventions, as public appeals for biological samples are often tied to campaigns that purport to support communities in crisis. In this paper, I examine the making of biodata – as biomaterials and bioinformation assemblages – in forensic collections and databases established in the aftermath of genocidal violence in Guatemala. Through a focus on forensic anthropology campaigns geared towards the collection of biological samples, the paper argues that the forensic biodata that emerges through forensic anthropology and forensic science expertise and practice, mark shifts in the material-semiotic constitution of genocide. Forensic biomaterials, bioinformation and biodata are entangled in knowledge practices and socio-technical operations that result in (re)biologizing genocide, as well as in (re)naturalizing race and gender.
Paper short abstract:
This article focuses on how the retrieved anonymized data is processed to utilize the shape of complicated networks of controlling covid-19. In particular, the relationship between the testing system and the specific way of controlling the disease is based on space, not individual behaviour.
Paper long abstract:
There are various ways of controlling the disease during the covid-19 pandemic. One of the main methods of controlling the disease was rigorous testing the infected and potentially infected person. In particular, South Korea and some countries in East Asia implemented aggressive and rigorous covid-19 tests to find infected patients and the potentially infected in the early stage of the pandemic. Testing, especially PCR tests became a household name for the K-quarantine policy. The testing system faces the sensitive issue of dealing with personal data of bioinformation. Soon after the outbreak of MERS in 2015, the lawmakers in South Korea legislated a new law to protect personal bioinformation in the situation of outbreaks of infectious diseases though, the anonymized personal bioinformation is a part of the big data system to figure out how the infected patients and their contacts are moving in a certain space. The testing and tracing system is the main backbone of the government’s policy for containing and preventing the disease in South Korea. This article focuses on how the retrieved anonymized data is processed to utilize the shape of complicated networks of controlling covid-19. In particular, the relationship between the testing system (PCR technology) and the specific way of controlling the disease is based on space, not individual behaviour.
Paper short abstract:
This paper utilizes Black and Indigenous feminist texts in the field of settler colonial studies to interrogate the establishment of telecommunications infrastructures which (re)produce bioinformation within settler colonial ontological schemas in the United States.
Paper long abstract:
Broadly, this paper utilizes critical texts in settler colonial studies authored by Black and Indigenous feminists to interrogate the historical development of telecommunications infrastructures which (re)produce bioinformation within settler colonial ontological schemas in the United States. More specifically, my work links the development of the telegraph, telephone, and early internet infrastructures in the U.S. to the creation and maintenance of data schemas which reflect settler colonial ontological orders and categorizations. I argue a web of networked settler logics emerges through this linkage of telecommunications nodes and data produced and reproduced through its circuitry. As part of this work, I discuss how access to the category of “the human” was and remains articulated through discourses of scientific racism and consider how settler colonial binaries of animacy and intimacy may limit that which constitutes bioinformation. The close of this paper asks us to consider how to confront and dismantle narratives of settler (technological) supremacy. Discourses couched in the rhetoric of democratic ideals, the public good, or the commons, abound with little critique or attention to the settler colonial ideologies these concepts are predicated upon. As a result, discourses couched in such logics are inherently limited by their reliance on settler state juridical interventions and fail to recognize their own investment in neoliberal progressive politics. The use of settler colonial studies as a robust framework asks us to reorient our arguments and to re-evaluate how we might imagine anti-colonial uses of computational technologies and data futures.
Paper short abstract:
Microbes have been receiving increasing attention as key agents of post-oil bioeconomies. The paper examines how the turn to digital sequence data in bioprospecting is augmenting the promises attributed to microbial life forms while at the same time turning them into elusive political entities.
Paper long abstract:
In view of the end of the golden years of the Norwegian oil economy, ocean genetic resources are being advertised in policy environments as holding great potential for the future of the country. Microbes have increased in popularity as promising agents of the Norwegian new bioeconomy, as advances in gene sequencing technologies and genomics have made them more accessible. This paper examines the turn toward digital sequence data in bioprospecting to inquire about its political implications. It draws on a combination of empirical materials to describe the infrastructural work that goes into extracting microbes from their in situ locations in arctic and subarctic waters to in silico collections and databases. I argue that in that infrastructural work, microbes may become both more promising and more elusive public and political matters. As biodiversity is turned into data, bioprospecting appears as less dependent on material samples, which may ultimately render policy frameworks for biodiversity governance obsolete. The shift toward big sequence data in bioprospecting entails shifts in how promise is attributed to biodiversity, which life forms appear to be more promising, and how such life forms come to appear as public good (Delgado, 2021)
Delgado A. Microbial Extractions: Sequence-based Bioprospecting, Augmented Promises, and Elusive Politics. Science, Technology, & Human Values. December 2021. doi:10.1177/01622439211055693
Paper short abstract:
This paper is concerned with ontology, multiplicity and bioinformation journeys. Specifically, it explores how alternative enactments of illness and health emerge, are stabilised and co-ordinated through bioinformation journeys across multiple domains of knowledge and practice.
Paper long abstract:
Recent years have seen growing interests in approaches such as behavioural biomarkers and digital phenotyping which seek to harness data generated from wearables and home sensors to develop novel and supposedly ‘ecological’ measures of disease. Through analysis of documentary evidence on the main companies and research initiatives in this area, and interviews with developers and data scientists in the public and private sector, in this paper we explore how alternative enactments of illness and health emerge, are stabilised and co-ordinated through bioinformation journeys across the multiple domains of knowledge and practice they traverse and shape.
Drawing on ethnographic sensibility to situated data practices, and emerging approaches within anthropology, sociology and STS, we explore what kind of bioinformation is produced and circulated, and what consequences this has. On one hand, we track how data is translated into biomarkers of neurological 'disease' for the purpose of biomedical research; on the other, we explore how it is fed back to users through consumer-oriented products aimed at supporting proactive engagement with brain 'health'.
We show how bioinformation contributes to reconfigure Alzheimer’s disease from a pathology of the brain to a disorder of the body-in-its-environment, but in doing so also reproduces a narrow view of the environment as mere backdrop to an individualised notion of risk. Further, we explore the digital promise of reconfiguring disease in terms of ‘personalised trajectory’, showing that the socio-technical processing of bioinformation in this context in fact reintroduces a biomedical model of ‘normal’ and ‘pathological’ that the tools supposedly challenge.