Call for Papers – AAA/CASCA Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Nov 20-24, 2019
Organisers: EJ Gonzalez-Polledo (Goldsmiths, University of London) and Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, University of London)
Towards an Anthropology of Bioinformation
Bioinformation refers to information that is derived from biological organisms or that describes biological processes and lives (Parry and Greenhough 2018). Bioinformation marks transitions from body to data, biological substance to information, and archives to datasets. These definitions orient the anthropology of bioinformation towards different types of archival forms and materialities that encompass, inter alia, repositories of paper-based health records, human remains in forensic archives of human rights violations, and the seemingly less tangible medical and forensic digital archives that often include biological samples as well as DNA sequencing information. Anthropological studies of biomedicine and bioethics have offered incisive accounts of how some of these transitions map onto the attribution or disavowal of personhood in medical contexts or how different epistemic communities might figure relations and belonging through these new technologies (Tamarkin 2014). They show how cultures of expertise bridge expert and lay divides, as the ‘new genetics’ (Pálsson 2008) offer new visual and mapping imaginaries for figuring relatedness, property and value. New ‘biosocialities’ (Rose 2007) also emerge, as bioinformation in its genetic iteration becomes an area of concern for publics as diverse as Indigenous communities and geneticists (TallBear 2013), patient groups (Shaw 2009), and sheep (Franklin 2007) and horse breeders (Cassidy 2002). Governments, non-governmental organisations, health systems and services routinely harvest bioinformation through increasingly complex and sophisticated infrastructures and computational architectures. In fact, bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures.
This panel draws on intersecting debates on archives, infrastructures, materiality and ethics to trace the contours of an anthropology of bioinformation. Through conceptual and ethnographic analyses of the purchase, ethics and politics of bioinformation, the panel will unpack questions of access and interpretation, taxonomic and individual identification, appropriation and reproduction. In the age of bioinformation, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, and scientific researchers. We are particularly interested in exploring anthropological analyses that engage the multiple values that bioinformation accrues as it travels from bodies to data in particular databases, archives and infrastructures, promoting logics and forms of governmentality that become opaque and out of reach for most citizens.
The panel asks:
* What is bioinformation and how is it constituted?
* What meanings are given to processes linked to bioinformation collection, retention and use, by different constituencies and cultures of evidence and expertise?
* What ‘decisions by bioinformation data’ are made, in what contexts and with t what consequences for diverse data publics and communities? What is the status of biorepositories, digital data sets, bioinformation and data archives across different jurisdictions and modes of governance?
* What questions are raised when considering what should be archived, curated, discarded or traded?
* How can anthropology approach the conceptual and ethical challenges of bioinformation?
Please submit your proposed paper abstract of 250 words or less by Thursday, March 28 to: EJ Gonzalez-Polledo (Goldsmiths [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>) and Silvia Posocco (Birkbeck, [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>).
Accepted panellists will be notified by Monday, April 1, and will be expected to submit their respective abstracts to the AAA by Friday, 5 April.
References
Cassidy, R. (2002). The sport of kings : kinship, class and thoroughbred breeding in Newmarket. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Franklin, S. (2007). Dolly mixtures : the remaking of genealogy. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Passlon, G. (2007). Anthropology and the new genetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Parry, B., & Greenhough, B. (2018). Bioinformation. Cambridge ; Medford, MA: Polity.
Rose, N. (2007). Politics of life itself : biomedicine, power and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. Princeton, N.J. ; Oxford: Princeton University Press.
TallBear, K. (2013). Native American DNA : tribal belonging and the false promise of genetic science. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Tamarkin, N. (2014). Genetic Diaspora: Producing Knowledge of Genes and Jews in Rural South Africa. Cultural Anthropology, 29(3), 552-574.
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