Archive
biology
“its known and unknown powers / to bind and dissociate”: Forensic Surveillance and the Policing of Biology
Featuring Shoshana Magnet, Cara Page, Rori Rohlfs, and Harriet Washington, moderated by Anthony Ureña at the 43rd Annual Scholar & Feminist Conference, "Subverting Surveillance: Strategies to End State Violence."
Read MoreNatural Product Synthesis : A Platform for Discovery in Chemistry and Biology
Sarah E. Reisman
The chemical synthesis of natural products provides an exciting platform from which to conduct fundamental research in chemistry and biology. Dr. Reisman’s laboratory has ongoing research programs targeting the chemical syntheses of several natural products. The densely packed arrays of heteroatoms and stereogenic centers that constitute these polycyclic targets challenge the limits of current technology […]
Read MoreLife (Un)Ltd: Feminism, Bioscience, Race
Rachel C. Lee
Like the symposium, this special issue foregrounds scholarship at the intersections of science and technology studies, feminist and queer studies, and race and postcolonial studies. The authors explore key questions emerging from the intensive biotechnological management of life that marks our age. Exploring the ways in which certain bodies and lands become, as they have for many centuries, the extractable material for scientific “discovery,” the authors make questions of gender, sexuality, and reproduction central to their queries.
Read MoreDorothy Roberts: Race, Gender, and the New Biocitizen
Full-length video of Dorothy Roberts' lecture, "Race, Gender, and the New Biocitizen."
Read MoreDorothy Roberts
Recorded Oct 15, 2012
Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals' unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. In this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre '48 lecture, Dorothy Roberts examines the role of race and gender in the construction of this new biocitizen in light of the current expansion of race-based, reproductive, and genetic biotechnologies along with neoliberal reliance on private resources for people's welfare. Roberts argues that science, big business, and politics are converging to support a molecularized understanding of race, health, and citizenship that ultimately helps to preserve inequities. An internationally recognized scholar, public intellectual, and social justice advocate, Dorothy Roberts has written and lectured extensively on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues and has been a leader in transforming public thinking and policy on reproductive health, child welfare, and bioethics. She is the Penn Integrates Knowledge/George A. Weiss University Professor, the Raymond Pace and Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander Professor of Civil Rights, and Professor of Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.
ListenA Global History of the Paternity Test
Nara Milanich
For millennia, Western legal tradition relied on the assumption “pater semper incertus est” (“the father is always uncertain”). But beginning in the early twentieth century, scientists began a concerted quest for a biological marker of paternity that could unambiguously link a child to his or her progenitor. Prior to the advent of DNA testing, scientists […]
Read MoreRace, Gender, and the New Biocitizen
Dorothy Roberts
Some writers have celebrated a new biological citizenship arising from individuals’ unprecedented ability to manage their health at the molecular level. In this year’s Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 lecture, Dorothy Roberts examines the role of race and gender in the construction of this new biocitizen in light of the current expansion of race-based, reproductive, and […]
Read MoreDoubting Sex: How Bodies Changed and Selves Appeared in Nineteenth Century Hermaphrodite Case Histories
Geertje Mak
Anna Barbara Meier and Emma R. both grew up as females in Germany, and were in their adult lives both medically declared to be male. However, there was a time gap of more than one century between the two cases. In her lecture, Geertje Mak shows that hermaphroditism itself changed profoundly over the course of […]
Read More“Predictable Failures” in the Trayvon Martin Story: Excerpts from The Private Bodies, Public Texts Salon
Excerpts from Private Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway, featuring Alondra Nelson, Karla FC Holloway, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Tina Campt.
Read MorePrivate Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway
Recorded Mar 21, 2012
The second event in BCRW’s newly inaugurated Salon Series features Karla FC Holloway, Tina Campt, Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Alondra Nelson. These scholars, whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics, respond to Karla FC Holloway’s new book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics, an important and groundbreaking work that examines instances where medical issues and information that would usually be seen as intimate, private matters are forced into the public sphere, calling for a new cultural bioethics that attends to the complex histories of race, gender, and class in the US.
ListenPrivate Bodies, Public Texts: A Salon in Honor of Karla FC Holloway
Karla FC Holloway, Tina Campt, Farah Griffin, Saidiya Hartman, Rebecca Jordan-Young, and Alondra Nelson
For the second event in BCRW’s newly inaugurated Salon Series, we have assembled a group of scholars whose expertise lies at the cross-section of law, race, gender, and bioethics to respond to Karla FC Holloway’s new book, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race, Gender, and a Cultural Bioethics. This important and groundbreaking work examines instances where […]
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