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**APOLOGIES FOR CROSS-POSTING**

WHAT IS MEDICINE?

Two CSISP seminars

Thursday 26 April
4.30-6.30 pm | Warmington Tower, Room 1204
with Simon Carter | Open University

Thursday 3 May
4.30-6.30 pm | Warmington Tower, Room 1204
with Melinda Cooper | Institute of Health, University of East Anglia


Heliosis: Sunshine, Hygiene and Medicine

Thursday 26 April
4.30-6.30 pm | Warmington Tower, Room 1204
with Simon Carter |  Open University

From the beginning of the 20th century a variety of medical forces changed
the relationship between human bodies and sunlight and in turn weaved
sunlight, as a giver of health, into the fabric of social environments.
For example both the People's League and the New Health Society played a
part in public health campaigns around the benefits of sunlight however
these campaigns framed sunlight exposure in order to stabilise a specific
social figuration as part of a broader social hygiene movement.  Yet, by
the early 1920s a variety of organisations and movements appeared that
sought to materially 'domesticate' the action sun's rays as a great health
benefit in its own right.  In this paper I will examine the promotion of
sunlight in this period in order to chart the emergence of a nexus made up
of bodies, sunlight and social environments.  I have termed this
assemblage a heliosis - to capture the idea of an interactive
stabilization between the various knotted couplings of the human body in
the sunlit environment.


Simon Carter's research is in Science and Technology Studies, especially
as applied to issues of health and medicine. He recently completed an
historical study examining the cultural turn towards the sun and sunlight
in early twentieth century Europe, providing an analysis of the roles that
sunlight played in the mediation of notions of health, pleasure, the body,
gender and class. He has also conducted research into critical approaches
to the public understanding of science as applied to health issues

-------------------------------

Clinical Capital - Neo-Liberalism and the Will to Experiment (China and
The Us)

Thursday 3 May
4.30-6.30 pm | Warmington Tower, Room 1204
with Melinda Cooper | Institute of Health, University of East Anglia

This paper considers the relocation of clinical trials and human subject
experimentation to China as a key site for examining the evolving fortunes
of Chinese and North-American neo-liberalism. Beginning with the premise
that  neo-liberalism as a mode of capitalism oscillates between the
imperatives of labour fluidity and incarceration, it considers the history
of clinical trials, imprisonment and regulation in the US as the necessary
context for understanding the recent rush to offshoring. What can we
deduce about the trends towards social and economic reform in China, where
a strikingly state-planned, indeed eugenic, approach to public health, is
coupled with a dramatic restructuring of the health system, every bit as
radical as that pursued by Reagan and his successors in the United States?
In this paper, I seek to understand drug and body experimentation as
practices that characterise both neo-liberal accumulation strategies and
an anti-disciplinarian politics of health. In other words, if the will to
experiment has become a distinguishing trait of contemporary capitalism,
it is also much more than that. Keeping in mind the slogan of AIDS
activists in the nineties,who claimed that "clinical trials are health
care too", I will be interested in some of the tensions that are arising
in China around the politics of infectious disease, sex and drug use.


Melinda Cooper graduated from the University of Paris VIII in 2001. She
has published widely in journals such as Theory, Culture and Society,
Angelaki, Configurations, Contretemps, Alternatives: Global, Local,
Political, PostModern Culture and Distinktion: Journal of Scandinavian
Social Theory. Her book Surplus Life: Biotechnology in the Neo-Liberal Era
is forthcoming from Washington University Press in 2007. She is currently
post-doctoral research fellow in the Institute of Health at the University
of East Anglia, where she is part of the Global Biopolitics Research
Group.

---------------------------------

Natalie Warner
Research Administrator
Centre for the Study of Invention and Social Process (CSISP)
Department of Sociology
Goldsmiths, University of London
New Cross
London
SE14 6NW
Tel: +44 (0)20 7919 7731
Fax: +44 (0)20 7919 7713
Web: www.goldsmiths.ac.uk/csisp

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