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P05a


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Plastic Data – bioinformation, coloniality and the promise of data futures 
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, -
Panel Video visible to paid-up delegates