1st Edition
Bioinformation Worlds and Futures
This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. 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. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.
1 Bioinformation Worlds and Futures: An Introduction
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo and Silvia Posocco
2 All the Data Creatures
Tahani Nadim
3 Capturing Genomes: The Friction and Flow of Bioinformation at the Smithsonian
Adrian Van Allen
4 The Kinship of Bioinformation: Relations in an Evolving Archive
Resto Cruz, Penny Tinkler, and Laura Fenton
5 Bioinformation In Formation: Inventing Medical Devices in Contemporary India
Anisha Chadha
6 Top_to_toe.ods: Bioinformation and the Politics of Rape Response
Sylvia McKelvie
7 American Bioinformation and U.S. Race Politics: The Values of Diverse Genetic Data
Anna Jabloner
8 Global E-Waste Epidemiology and Emerging Politics of Bioinformatic Extraction
Peter Little
9 Seeing Like an Airport: towards Interoperability in Contemporary Security
Mark Maguire and Eileen Murphy
10 Surrender: (Bio)information in the Era of the Pandemic in South Korea
Kiheung Kim and Jongmi Kim
Afterword
Noah Tamarkin
Biography
EJ Gonzalez-Polledo teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought (Rowman and Littlefield international), and are currently developing research on global open biology movements and global histories of bioinformation.
Silvia Posocco is an anthropologist based at Birkbeck, University of London. Posocco is the author of Secrecy and Insurgency: Socialities and Knowledge Practices in Guatemala (2014). Current projects include research on the archives of transnational adoption in the aftermath of genocide as well as new collaborative work on global histories of bioinformation.