Biopolitics Seminar Series

Biological Citizenship

This project defines biological citizenship as a condition in which relations between the individual and the state are conceived through the body and its status. Symposia will examine how the state and other political and economic institutions organize, classify, and categorize bodies, resources, and activities according to and in conjunction with biological knowledge.

The Eating Subject

In conjunction with the campus- and community-wide reading of Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food, this project will consider food in a multidisciplinary framework. Symposia will explore the ethics, politics, and cultures of food, with a particular emphasis on how bodies and subjects become recognizable through what they eat (or do not eat).

Upcoming Events

• Heather Paxson
• Associate Professor of Anthropology, MIT
• Reverse-Engineering Terroir: Locating the Value of American Artisan Cheese
• December 10, 2009 @ 4:00 pm
• University Club Building, Room 313
• This event is one of the WIH Biopolitics Symposia events.

• Initially applied to wine, the French notion of terroir, loosely translated as the taste of place, has long been a value-adding label bestowing distinction. Recently, American artisan cheesemakers have been experimenting with "translating terroir" to reveal the range of values — agrarian, environmental, social, gastronomic — that they believe constitute their cheese and distinguish artisan from commodity production. Some domestic cheesemakers are self-consciously working to reverse-engineer terroir: developing cheeses and natural-cultural landscapes that are well suited to one another. More than approaching terroir as a descriptive label to characterize how distinctive tastes express valued characteristics of place, these rural entrepreneurs approach terroir prescriptively, as a model for practice that might create place through environmental stewardship and rural economic revitalization. U.S. terroir talk reveals attempts to reconcile the economic and socio-moral values that producers invest in artisan cheese.
   

  Photo: Anne Topham at the Dane County Farmers' Market

• Dr. Paxon is a cultural anthropologist at MIT, where she is Class of '57 Career Development Associate Professor. She received her PhD from Stanford University and her BA from Haverford College. She is interested in how people craft a sense of themselves as moral beings in everyday, bodily practices including sex, reproduction, and eating.

• Kelly Moore
• Associate Professor of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago
• Making a National Body: Neoliberalism and U.S. Federal Nutrition Policy
• February 18, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
• University Club Building, Room 313
• This event is one of the WIH Biopolitics Symposia events.

• From the bodies of the poor, black, and hungry, to the bodies of the middle class, white and overfed, the focus of U.S. federal nutrition guidelines and policies have shifted over the past forty years. So, too, have the expectations of the skills and emotional engagements of users of these guidelines: citizens are now conceived of as consumers who continually and cheerfully sort and apply information and ideas about what to eat and how to eat, reflecting ideals of neoliberal citizenship that emerged in the 1970s. Policy debates and mass media are used to explore the rise and contemporary formulations of the new citizen-consumer.     
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    

• Kelly Moore is a sociologist of science whose work focuses on public political debates over scientific knowledge at Loyola University Chicago. She is the editor (with Scott Frickel) of "The New Political Sociology of Science: Institutions, Netoworks, and Power" (University of Wisconsin Press, 2006)

• Steven Epstein
• John C. Shaffer Professor of Sociology
• April 12, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
• University Club Building, Room 313
• This event is one of the WIH Biopolitics Symposia events.

• Steven Epstein
• John C. Shaffer Professor of Sociology
• April 12, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
• University Club Building, Room 313
• This event is one of the WIH Biopolitics Symposia events.

Past Events

• Didier Fassin
• James D. Wolfensohn Professor, School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton; and Director of Studies, Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales, Paris
• Subjectivity without subject?: The Aporia of Bearing Witness to Violence in Palestine
• November 16, 2009 @ 4:00 pm
• University Club Building, Room 313
• This event is one of the WIH Biopolitics Symposia events.

• The witness has become a key figure of our time, whether as a survivor testifying to what he has lived through (superstes) or as a third party telling what he has seen or heard (testis). Publicly bearing witness to suffering and injustice also distinguishes the first age of humanitarianism (International Red Cross) and the second wave (Doctors without Borders, Doctors of the World).
  
  Focusing on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, I will show how humanitarian organizations establish a legitimate way of communicating the "victims' truth" to the world and treat victims as experts and authorities (auctor). One of the effects of this shift, the increasing presence of psychiatrists and psychologists in the field, also renders trauma less a clinical category than a political argument. Drawing upon an analysis of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, this examination raises general questions about the politics of testimony in a time when political causes become global and moral sentiments enter the political sphere. It also questions the processes of subjectification that result in the production of
  subjectivities and the obliteration of subjects.
  

  Didier Fassin's visit has been co-sponsored by The Center for European Studies, the Robet F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies, and the Department of Anthropology
  

• Didier Fassin's body of work is situated at the intersection of the theoretical and ethnographic foundations of the main areas of anthropology—social, cultural, political, medical. Trained as a medical doctor, Fassin has conducted field studies in Senegal, Ecuador, South Africa, and France, leading to publications that have illuminated important aspects of urban and maternal health, public health policy, social disparities in health, and the AIDS epidemic.