Thomas Söderqvist If you happen to have your way through Toronto in the autumn and spring, why not visit The Women and Gender Studies Institute at the University of Toronto to attend its “Biopolitics + Technoscience” meeting series.
This series is an interdisciplinary exploration of how life-itself is transformed through technology, science, and governance in a transnational world. Its premise is that “biopolitics” — loosely defined as the governing of life — is a productive starting point to theorize the multiple and conflicting ways technoscience has altered living-being in forms as varied as sex, race, genomes, biodiversity, national populations and labor. The series is composed of fall roundtables and spring public lectures.
Oct. 12, 4-6pm. BIOMEDICAL SUBJECTIVITIES
Speakers: Nicholas Matte, Bonnie McElhinny, Stuart Murray and Deborah
Steinberg
Chair: Michelle Murphy
Oct. 26th, 4-6pm. WEIGHING LIFE’S WORTH
Speakers: Sean Hawkins, Kathryn Morgan, Michelle Murphy and Mike Pettit
Chair: Mariana Valverde
Nov. 23rd, 4-6pm. DISPOSABLE LIFE
Speakers: Lisa Helps, Ken Kawashima, Jon Soske
Chair: Ritu Birla
Nov. 30, 4-6pm. INFORMATION POLITICS
Speakers: Megan Boler, Nadia Caidi, Andrew Clement, Ronald Deibert
Chair: Brian Cantwell Smith
Jan. 11, 4-6pm. KAVITA PHILIP (University of California Irvine)
“Producing Technoscientific Property and Gender Subjects”
co-sponsored with South Asian Studies
Sidney Smith 2098
Jan. 25, 4-6pm. HANNAH LANDECKER (Rice University)
“Coiling and Recoiling: Ethnography of Alternative Heredities”
Sidney Smith 2135
Feb. 1, 4-6pm. VINH-KIM NGUYEN (Universite de Montreal)
“Experimentality: Humanitarian Populations and Shifts in Biomedical
Epistemology. Examples from AIDS and Other Epidemics in Africa”
Co-sponsored with Global AIDS Speaker Series, Equity Studies, and GAPP
Sidney Smith 2098
Feb. 9, 4-6pm. JACKIE ORR (Syracuse University)
“Daddy Does Cybernetics: Diary of a Mental Patient”
Co-sponsored with Centre for the Study of the U.S.
Sidney Smith 2098
March 15, 4-6pm. GABRIELLE HECHT (University of Michigan)
“African Bodies and Nuclear Things: Scenes from the Transnational
Production of Uranium”.
A detailed schedule of the whole series is available at http://www.utoronto.ca/wgsi/biopolitics. Questions can be directed to the organizers, Michelle Murphy, michelle.murphy@utoronto.ca and Brian Beaton, brian.beaton@utoronto.ca
