Download or read book The Genetic Imaginary written by Neil Gerlach and published by University of Toronto Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DNA testing and banking has become institutionalized in the Canadian criminal justice system. As accepted and widespread though the practice is, there has been little critique or debate of this practice in a broad public forum on the potential infringement of individual rights or civil liberties. Neil Gerlach's The Genetic Imaginary takes up this challenge, critically examining the social, legal, and criminal justice origins and effects of DNA testing and banking. Drawing on risk analysis, Gerlach explains why Canadians have accepted DNA technology with barely a ripple of public outcry. Despite promises of better crime control and protections for existing privacy rights, Gerlach's examination of police practices, courtroom decisions, and the changing role of scientific expertise in legal decision-making reveals that DNA testing and banking have indeed led to a measurable erosion of individual rights. Biogovernance and the biotechnology of surveillance almost inevitably lead to the empowerment of state agent control and away from due process and legal protection. The Genetic Imaginary demonstrates that the overall effect of these changes to the criminal justice system has been to emphasize the importance of community security at the expense of individual rights. The privatization and politicization of biogovernance will certainly have profound future implications for all Canadians.
Download or read book Global Nature Global Culture written by Sarah Franklin and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2000-09-26 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: `An excellent book. The authors have the rare capacity to handle popular culture and case studies in a theoretically informed manner. Original and well researched′ - Mike Featherstone, Nottingham Trent University Understandings of globalization have been little explored in relation to gender or related concerns such as identity, subjectivity and the body. This book contrasts `the natural′ and `the global′ as interpretive strategies, using approaches from feminist cultural theory. The book begins by introducing the central themes: ideas of the natural; questions of scale and context posed by globalization and their relation to forms of cultural production; the transformation of genealogy; and the emergence of interest in definitions of life and life forms. The authors explores these questions through a number of case studies including Benneton advertising, Jurassic Park, The Body Shop, British Airways, Monsanto and Dolly the Sheep. In order to respecify the `nature, culture and gender′ concerns of two decades of feminist theory, this highly original book reflects, hypothesizes and develops new interpretive possibilities within established feminist analytical frames.
Download or read book The Cinematic Life of the Gene written by Jackie Stacey and published by Duke University Press Books. This book was released on 2010-04-02 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A leading feminist film theorist argues that the cinema animates the tropes of and enacts our fears about cloning and other kinds of genetic engineering.
Download or read book Television and the Genetic Imaginary written by Sofia Bull and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-05-30 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the complex ways in which television articulates ideas about DNA in the early 21st century. Considering television’s distinct aesthetic and narrative forms, as well as its specific cultural roles, it identifies TV as a key site for the genetic imaginary. The book addresses the key themes of complexity and kinship, which function as nodes around which older essentialist notions about the human genome clash with newly emergent post-genomic sensibilities. Analysing a wide range of US and UK programmes, from science documentaries, science fiction serials and crime procedurals, to family history programmes, sitcoms and reality shows, Television and the Genetic Imaginary illustrates the extent to which molecular frameworks of understanding now permeate popular culture.
Download or read book Bits of Life written by Anneke M. Smelik and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new, but the pervasiveness of that integration is staggering, as is the speed at which the two have been merging in recent decades. As this process permeates more of everyday life, the urgent necessity arises to rethink both biology and technology. Indeed, the human body can no longer be regarded either as a bounded entity or as a naturally given and distinct part of an unquestioned whole. Bits of Life assumes a posthuman definition of the body. It is grounded in questions about today's biocultures, which pertain neither to humanist bodily integrity nor to the anthropological assumption that human bodies are the only ones that matter. Editors Anneke Smelik and Nina Lykke aid in mapping changes and transformations and in striking a middle road between the metaphor and the material. In exploring current reconfigurations of bodies and embodied subjects, the contributors pursue a technophilic, yet critical, path while articulating new and thoroughly appraised ethical standards.
Download or read book The Case against Perfection written by Michael J Sandel and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Breakthroughs in genetics present us with a promise and a predicament. The promise is that we will soon be able to treat and prevent a host of debilitating diseases. The predicament is that our newfound genetic knowledge may enable us to manipulate our nature—to enhance our genetic traits and those of our children. Although most people find at least some forms of genetic engineering disquieting, it is not easy to articulate why. What is wrong with re-engineering our nature? The Case against Perfection explores these and other moral quandaries connected with the quest to perfect ourselves and our children. Michael Sandel argues that the pursuit of perfection is flawed for reasons that go beyond safety and fairness. The drive to enhance human nature through genetic technologies is objectionable because it represents a bid for mastery and dominion that fails to appreciate the gifted character of human powers and achievements. Carrying us beyond familiar terms of political discourse, this book contends that the genetic revolution will change the way philosophers discuss ethics and will force spiritual questions back onto the political agenda. In order to grapple with the ethics of enhancement, we need to confront questions largely lost from view in the modern world. Since these questions verge on theology, modern philosophers and political theorists tend to shrink from them. But our new powers of biotechnology make these questions unavoidable. Addressing them is the task of this book, by one of America’s preeminent moral and political thinkers.
Download or read book Biopunk Dystopias written by Lars Schmeink and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.
Download or read book Beyond Realism written by Robert Singer and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2024-04-30 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice is the first major critical study of international naturalist cinema. Often mistaken for realist film, international naturalist cinema has a unique cultural and critical history. From its earliest representation in silent films such as Walsh's Regeneration (1915), and Eisenstein's Stachka/Strike (1925), to recent productions such as Chukwu's Clemency (2019), and Aronofsky's The Whale (2022), the naturalist film narrative encompasses the whole of film history, traversing language, movement, and genre. The naturalist film is predicated on two foundational, intersecting paradigms that configure as one ideological system in an overarching scientific and social experimental narrative. Either the scientific or social paradigm may be dominant in the film narrative or they may simply co-exist, but a naturalist film reveals both templates and, most significantly, suggests an implicit cinematic anthropology that renders the body as an observed spectacle.
Download or read book Migrations Interdisciplinary Perspectives written by Michi Messer and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-05-26 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume covers the most important contributions to and discussions at the international symposium Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives (1-3, July, University of Vienna), organised by Renée Schroeder and Ruth Wodak which was dedicated to the multiple interdisciplinary dimensions of ‘migrations’, both from the viewpoints of the Social Sciences and Humanities as well as from the manifold perspectives of the Natural Sciences. The book is organized along the following dimensions: Urban Development and Migration Peer Relations in Immigrant Adolescents: Methodological Challenges and Key Findings Migration, Identity, and Belonging Migration in/and Ego Documents Debating Migration Fundamentals of Diffusion and Spread in the Natural Sciences and beyond Media Representations of Migrants and Migration Migration and the Genes
Download or read book Prenatal Testing and Disability Rights written by Erik Parens and published by Georgetown University Press. This book was released on 2000-09-28 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As prenatal tests proliferate, the medical and broader communities perceive that such testing is a logical extension of good prenatal care—it helps parents have healthy babies. But prenatal tests have been criticized by the disability rights community, which contends that advances in science should be directed at improving their lives, not preventing them. Used primarily to decide to abort a fetus that would have been born with mental or physical impairments, prenatal tests arguably reinforce discrimination against and misconceptions about people with disabilities. In these essays, people on both sides of the issue engage in an honest and occasionally painful debate about prenatal testing and selective abortion. The contributors include both people who live with and people who theorize about disabilities, scholars from the social sciences and humanities, medical geneticists, genetic counselors, physicians, and lawyers. Although the essayists don't arrive at a consensus over the disability community's objections to prenatal testing and its consequences, they do offer recommendations for ameliorating some of the problems associated with the practice.
Download or read book Fantasies of Identification written by Ellen Samuels and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2014-04-25 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity In the mid-nineteenth-century United States, as it became increasingly difficult to distinguish between bodies understood as black, white, or Indian; able-bodied or disabled; and male or female, intense efforts emerged to define these identities as biologically distinct and scientifically verifiable in a literally marked body. Combining literary analysis, legal history, and visual culture, Ellen Samuels traces the evolution of the “fantasy of identification”—the powerful belief that embodied social identities are fixed, verifiable, and visible through modern science. From birthmarks and fingerprints to blood quantum and DNA, she examines how this fantasy has circulated between cultural representations, law, science, and policy to become one of the most powerfully institutionalized ideologies of modern society. Yet, as Samuels demonstrates, in every case, the fantasy distorts its claimed scientific basis, substituting subjective language for claimed objective fact. From its early emergence in discourses about disability fakery and fugitive slaves in the nineteenth century to its most recent manifestation in the question of sex testing at the 2012 Olympic Games, Fantasies of Identification explores the roots of modern understandings of bodily identity.
Download or read book Imagenation written by José Van Dijck and published by Springer. This book was released on 1998-01-31 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genetics seems more popular then ever. DNA technology not only sustains large areas of biomedicine and business, but also prevails in social and legal practices and takes root in cultural products. Since the late 1950s, the public image of genetics metamorphosed from a suspect branch of research into a thriving, well-funded field of biomedicine. Images and imaginations have played a crucial role in the popularization of genetic knowledge. The media played up images of engineered bugs, scientists promoted images of selfish genes and science fiction writers infested the imagination with stories of cloned monsters. Imag e nation examines the role of science, journalism and fiction in the popularization of genetics.
Download or read book The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture written by Anneke Smelik and published by V&R unipress GmbH. This book was released on 2010 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular media, art and science are intricately interlinked in contemporary visual culture. This book analyses the scientific imaginary that is the result of the profound effects of science upon the imagination, and conversely, of the imagination in and upon science. As scientific developments in genetics occur and information technology and cybernetics open up new possibilities of intervention in human lives, cultural theorists have explored the notion of the posthuman. The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture analyses figurations of the posthu-man in history and philosophy, as well as in its utopian and dystopian forms in art and popular culture. The authors thus address the blurring boundaries between art and science in diverse media like science fiction film, futurist art, video art and the new phenomenon of bio-art. In their evaluations of the scientific imaginary in visual culture, the authors engage critically with current scientific and technological concerns.
Download or read book Genetic Suspects written by Richard Hindmarsh and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-12 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As DNA forensic profiling and databasing become established as key technologies in the toolbox of the forensic sciences, their expanding use raises important issues that promise to touch everyone's lives. In an authoritative global investigation of a diverse range of countries, including those at the forefront of these technologies' development and use, this book identifies and provides critical reflection upon the many issues of privacy; distributive justice; DNA information system ownership; biosurveillance; function creep; the reliability of collection, storage and analysis of DNA profiles; the possibility of transferring medical DNA information to forensics databases; and democratic involvement and transparency in governance, an emergent key theme. This book is timely and significant in providing the essential background and discussion of the ethical, legal and societal dimensions for academics, practitioners, public interest and criminal justice organisations, and students of the life sciences, law, politics, and sociology.
Download or read book Genes and the Bioimaginary written by Deborah Lynn Steinberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-03-03 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genes and the Bioimaginary examines the dramatic rise and contemporary cultural apotheosis of 'the gene'. The book traces not only the genetification of modern life but is also a journey through the complex relationship between science and culture. At the heart of this book are three interlinked questions. The first concerns the paradigmatic transformations of the 'genetics revolution': how can we understand the impact of genes on social arenas as diverse as law and agriculture, politics and medicine, genealogy and jurisprudence? Second, how has the language of genes come to pervade public discourse - as much a trope of personal narrative as of the popular imaginary? And third, how can we gain critical purchase not only on the conditions and consequences of a particular science, but on its projective seductions, the terms of its persuasion, and the dilemmas and anxieties provoked in its wake? Through a series of illuminating case studies ranging from 'gay genes' to 'Jew genes', to genes for crime; from CSI to the Innocence Project, from genetics (post)racial imaginary to its phantasies of redemption, the book examines the emergence of the gene as a pre-eminent locus of both scientific and social explanation, and as a powerful object of spectacle, projective phantasy and attachment. Genes and the Bioimaginary makes a distinctive contribution to our understanding of how knowledge comes to be not only powerful, but plausible.
Download or read book Reimagining Bio Medicalization Pharmaceuticals and Genetics written by Susan E. Bell and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing, and the potential shapes it will take in the future. They develop a unique argument that medicalization, biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalization and geneticization are related and co-evolving processes, present throughout the globe. This is an ideal addition to anthropology, sociology and STS courses about medicine and health.
Download or read book Contested Categories written by Ayo Wahlberg and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on social science perspectives, Contested Categories presents a series of empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. In doing so, it shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes. Organized around the themes of biological substances and objects, personhood and the genomic body and the creation and dispersion of knowledge, each of the volume’s chapters reveals the elusive nature of fixity with regard to life science categories. With contributions from an international team of scholars, this book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the social, legal, policy and ethical implications of science and technology and the life sciences.
