Call for papers

Sentient creatures: Transforming biopolitics and life matters
Conference hosted by the University of Oslo 15-17 September 2010

The concepts of biopower and biopolitcs, so eloquently and  
significantly laid out by Michel Foucault, are quite possibly  
insufficient to our understanding of past and contemporary living.  
Just think about zoonoses including the ?swine flue? pandemic, and the  
ways in which the production of facts about the human body have been  
and continue to be built upon the observation and manipulation of  
animals. These and similar examples suggest that two correctives or  
re-emphases are required.  First, studies of life and the living alert  
us to the fact that biopolitics is not only about humans, in the form  
of the human individual, or in the form of the human population, it is  
rather about an assemblage of matters of life.  Second, there is  
neither a self evident or totalising human power over life, nor an  
unproblematic politics of life. The relation between life and politics  
needs both theoretical and empirical specificity.  To expand slightly  
on each of these:

First, even a narrow focus on the life of living humans immediately  
takes in nonhumans and other than human lives. Securing life and  
making life live is always more than human.  Indeed, humans are and  
always have been conditioned upon non-humans: as in laboratory  
medicine, in our ways of producing and taking life - for food, and as  
crucial entities in debates about who ?we? think ?we? are. Animals are  
objects, but also subjects, symbols and signs.

Second, if lives are practised in many places and with many others,  
then how do we start to understand the lives that are being and have  
been made? Past work has tended to underline various practices of  
control and technologies of knowledge and surveillance. Perhaps rather  
than an overarching framework we need narratives and ethnographies of  
the living, taking in the multi-sited, multi-logic and multiple ways  
in which lives are and have been assembled, disassembled, practised  
and possibly policed and politicised.  Instead of asking only how is  
and has control and knowledge been extended over life, we should also  
look at the imperfect living practices which often defy orders, escape  
detection, fail to produce or only loosely hang together.

An aim of this conference is to bring historically oriented narratives  
and approaches together with contemporary studies, hence to bring ?the  
archive? into an exchange with, for instance, ethnographic ways of  
working. It is to link the ways in which we narrate the past now, with  
ways of approaching and re-presenting the present. Thus our questions  
will not only evolve around ?what´s going on?, ?what are these  
transformations?, but also the question of method; how to do the work  
? empirically as well as theoretically.

Possible topics for sessions and papers are:
Protecting, caring, conserving, killing, enhancing, ordering,  
securing, displaying, naming, modeling ? lives

How do we understand current and past interventions in lives and  
living processes?

Are current and past attempts to politicize biology,and to biologize  
politics, or biopolitics, sufficient to understand who and what is at  
stake?

How are practices as diverse as public health, health care,  
agriculture, field and laboratory science, politics and war changing  
lives and altering as those lives change?

The conference will take place at the Thorbjørnrud hotel outside Oslo.  
The event is a ?joint venture? with CULTRANS  
(http://www.cultrans.uio.no) and the projects ?Newcomers to the farm?,  
?Animals as objects and animals as signs ? standardisation and  
visualization of animals?, ?Nature and Science in Politics and  
Everyday Practices? and the Research network ?DRUGS?.

If you want to take part in the conference: Send an abstract of about  
400 words to [log in to unmask] presenting your research  
interest and the paper you want to present at the conference. Deadline  
March 15 2010. Deadline for a short version of the paper will be May  
15. There will be a conference fee covering hotel and food expenses.

Organizing committee: Kristin Asdal, Christoph Gradmann, Steve  
Hinchliffe, Marianne Lien, Kristina Skåden, Liv Emma Thorsen.