Changing Life

by Taylor, Peter J.; Halfon, Saul E.; Edwards, Paul N.

• ISBN13: 9780816630134
• ISBN10: 0816630135
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1997-09-01
• Publisher: Univ of Minnesota Pr

Summary

In laboratories all over the world, life -- even the idea of life -- is changing. And with these changes, whether they result in square tomatoes or cyborgs, come transformations in our social order -- sometimes welcome, sometimes troubling. Changing Life offers a close look at how the mutable forms and concepts of life link the processes of science to those of information, finance, and commodities. These essays -- about planetary management and genome sequencing, ecologies and cyborgs -- address actual and imagined transformations at the center and at the margins of transnational relations, during the post-Cold War era and in times to come.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Changing Life in the New World Dis/Order	p. 1
The Terminator Meets Commander Data: Cyborg Identity in the New World Order	p. 14
Bodies of Knowledge: Biology and the Intercultural University	p. 36
Genetic Engineering, Discourses of Deficiency, and the New Politics of Population	p. 56
Contradictions along the Commodity Road to Environmental Stabilization: Foresting Gambian Gardens	p. 85
Discipline or Solidarity?: Ecology as Politics	p. 102
Overpopulating the World: Notes toward a Discursive Reading	p. 121
How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Undifferentiated Science-Politics and Its Potential Reconstruction	p. 149
Do Androids Pulverize Tiger Bones to Use as Aphrodisiacs?	p. 175
Bubbles in the Cosmic Saucepan	p. 196
Afterword: Shifting Positions for Knowing and Intervening in the Cultural Politics of the Life Sciences	p. 203
Contributors	p. 225
Index	p. 227
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