bios news issue 15. summer 2010

BIOSBIOS NewsIssue 15 • Summer Term

In this issue

Editorial 1

Letter from Trieste by Nikolas Rose 2

ESRC Mid-Career Fellowship on the Politics of Bioterrorism by Filippa Lentzos 4

Notes from the 2010 BIOS Annual Lecture’ by Naomi Shuman 5

Contested Categories: Life Science in Society edited by Susanne Bauer and Ayo Wahlberg Book review by Valentina Amorese 6

Research updates from Joelle Abi-Rached and Btihaj Ajana 7

Postcards from David Reubi and Anders Kruse Ljungdalh 9

Publications and conference presentations 11

Upcoming events 12

BIOS News Issue 15 • Summer 2010 1

‘What it means to be human’

Credit: Charcot wearing top hat and surgical apron, holding a brain. Drawing by: Brissaud, E From: Nouvelle Iconographie de la Salpêtrière, 1898. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London.

EditorialWe have given this issue the rather grand title, ‘what it means to be human.’ While we ruefully acknowledge that this topic remains unlikely to be resolved within the pages of BIOS News, we still hope that the reader will encounter, here, some starting-points for thinking about the ways that one might consider such a problem – and, also, for thinking about the complex ethical burdens imposed by that very thought, and consideration, itself. In a ‘letter’ from Trieste, published in this issue, Nikolas Rose recounts his experience at a recent conference on mental health, and how he was subsequently moved to reflect on the ‘new sense of our bodies and brains that is taking shape,’ and also on the consequences of such a development for the kinds of beings that we imagine ourselves to be. These issues of humanness,

selfhood and corporeality were also among the central themes explored in the ‘Brain, Self and Society’ project in BIOS, and so we have an update on the project from Joelle Abi-Rached. Meanwhile, related thoughts were outlined by Rayna Rapp during a wonderful BIOS annual lecture in February, where Rayna considered some of the ways that kinds of people might be implicated in particular ways of thinking about, and acting upon, mental disorders and human bodies – and we have a report from that lecture too. The kind of being you are, of course, is reflected in both the phenomena of which you are thought to be at risk, and the practice of government to which you may be consequently subjected: in this issue, we have a report from Filippa Lentzos on the ESRC Mid-Career Fellowship that will allow her to draw together, and to

further explore, her exciting ongoing work on biosecurity and bioterrorism; and we also have an update from Btihaj Ajana, on her doctoral work on biometrics and biopolitics, and about the ways that ideas of identity, belonging and citizenship are ‘being reconfigured in the name of risk and security.’ Elsewhere, and perhaps on a slightly lighter note, we have a book review from Valentina Amorese, postcards from much-missed friends, David Reubi and Anders Kruse Ljungdahl, a list of all of our recent publications and presentations, and, finally, a particularly exciting litany of upcoming events, where we hope to see you in the coming months.

Have a fantastic summer term!

The BIOS News team

2 BIOS News Issue 15 • Summer 2010

Letter from Trieste by Nikolas Rose

It doesn’t usually snow in Trieste in February, said my guide as we battled through a blizzard up the steep slopes of the Parco San Giovanni. I was in Trieste at the request of Dr Franco Rotelli to give the opening keynote at an international conference on ‘what is mental health today?’ Trieste was the heartland of the movement for democratic psychiatry in Italy led by Franco Basaglia which resulted in the famous Law 180 of 1978 that froze admissions to psychiatric hospitals, and was supposed to lead to the gradual phasing out of the asylum in favour of community mental health services. After struggles over the 1960s to transform the asylum at Gorizia, on the border with what was then Yugoslavia, opening the locked wards and developing forms of collective participation of patients and staff, Basaglia became director of the nearby Trieste psychiatric hospital which housed 1200 inmates. It was the closure of this asylum from 1971 to 1979 that demonstrated for his many students and followers that there was a psychiatric future beyond incarceration, beyond that dichotomy of care and control that, for Basaglia, ran through the heart of the psychiatric system. And the location of the conference was the former asylum, a sprawling collection of buildings on the steep slopes that led up from the outskirts of Trieste – built on a narrow strip of land bordering the Adriatic Sea – to the forbidding hills that rise immediately behind.

In the partially refurbished buildings of the old asylum, around 1,000 people a day gathered, despite the freezing conditions, to consider the national and international legacy of the Basaglia reforms. I had been reluctant to be among the speakers, although I have been engaged with critical psychiatry since my days at University, and had followed the Italian reforms quite closely. This was mainly because my research over the last few years has focussed on developments within neuroscience, rather than in the politics of mental health. But it was also because I have some criticisms of the doctrine of ‘recovery’ that has become the mantra of much of the radical movement in mental health, and of the bureaucratisation of ‘the community’ that accompanied the transformation of community mental health from the demand of a critical movement into an elaborate professionalised apparatus. But in the end, overcoming all my feeble objections, Dr. Rotelli – one of Basaglia’s students and now Director of Mental Health Services in the Trieste region – prevailed. Thus, as the formal opening statements from the great and good ended, I found myself, still shaking off the snow, with the somewhat scary honour of addressing a very large audience in the renamed Basaglia Theatre, trying to outline the new territory for the politics of mental health today.

I suggested that this territory was defined by two dimensions. Along the first, the external space of everyday life, the expert management of mental health ‘in the community’, meets the internal space of the brain, the experts of the neuromolecular gaze. Along the second, the language of the user’s voice, rights and ‘recovery’ meets the language of the national and global ‘burden’ of mental disorder. To demonstrate that, I described the rise of ‘disorders without borders’ – the estimates that claim that ‘brain disease’ will soon be the most significant cause of life years lost by disability, and that in any one year almost one third of adults in the general population suffer from a DSM³ diagnosable mental disorder – the discourse on ‘the burden of mental disorder’ that some hope will make politicians to devote attention to these conditions, and others, notably those from the mental patients movements, find deeply offensive. I showed the data that demonstrates that, over the 1990s, the rate of consumption of psychiatric drugs had risen remarkably, not just via new drugs for the treatment of depression and anxiety, but in the acceptance of the routine modulation of mental states by psychopharmacology – suggesting links between such ‘neurochemical selves’ and the pathologies of ‘freedom’. I examined the rise of neuropsychiatry, the argument that all mental disorders are, at root, disorders of the brain, and the ways in which the early beliefs about relatively straightforward genomic and functional correlates of psychiatric disorders were proving unfounded, leading many to seek more complex models of the relations between genes, neurons, brains, persons and societies. I explored the successive ‘blurring of boundaries’ in the recent history of diagnosis in psychiatry: in the 1950s, between the inside and outside asylum; in the 1960s, between neuroses and psychoses; in the 1980s, between mental and physical disorders which DSM III termed ‘a reductionist anachronism of mind/body dualism’; in the 1990s, between states (of illness) and traits (of personality) as now variations in both are explained in same terms; and in the 2000s, between illness and pre-illness, with the rise of the language of biomarkers and the search for susceptibilities. This, I suggested, was the new territory for the politics of mental health.

As you can imagine, my approach was not welcomed by all. ‘Forget psychiatry, take recovery into your own hands’ was the evangelical injunction of the speaker from the recovery movement who followed me. The ‘spontaneous philosophy’ of many who attended was ‘anti-medicalization’, and many were sceptical of my suggestion that the hard reductionism of neuropsychiatry was running into the sand, and more complex arguments about brains and their openness offered

¹ Details of Basaglia’s career, and his key writings, can be found in Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Anne M. Lovell, eds., 1987, Psychiatry Inside Out: Selected Writings of Franco Basaglia, New York: Columbia University Press. Nancy Scheper-Hughes was at the conference and still works with many of those involved in democratic psychiatry in Italy.

² See, for example, P Miller and N Rose, eds, 1986, The Power of Psychiatry, Cambridge: Polity Press.

³ DSM is shorthand for the successive editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, published in successive editions by the American Psychiatric Association since 1952.

Franco Basaglia (1979)


some opportunities for alliances between the human sciences and the neurosciences. I tried to spell this out in the many newspaper and television interviews that followed. My arguments fell on more fertile ground with a new generation of critical psychiatrists who recognised that it was futile and counterproductive to draw up battle lines ‘for or against’ drugs, ‘for or against’ psychiatry, let alone ‘for or against’ the idea that who we are and how we are as human beings has anything to do with our brains.

But before I was to meet up again with those psychiatrists, I participated in two other sessions. As I tramped my way through the blizzard to the first – ‘New Drugs for Old Illnesses?’ – I was expecting a relaxed round table discussion, but instead I found myself in a five hour session without breaks, in Italian in which I was expected to deliver – to extemporise – an hour long presentation on the nature of psychopharmacological societies. As we debated the data of the rising trends of drug use in different regions, and the strange variations between countries, and listened to presentations on patterns of drug use in Italy, many assumptions about what shaped this phenomenon were thrown into question. Notably, while the early period of closure of the asylums in Italy had been accompanied by very high use of drugs in community mental health centres, it seems that today Italy, and the Friuli-Venezia Giulia region of which Trieste is the capital, has not substituted increased consumption of psycho-pharmaceuticals for hospital inpatient treatment. There are, I was told, no forensic psychiatric beds at all used in this region of around 210,000 people, and indeed very few in-patient beds at all – I seemed to hear that there were less than a dozen for the whole region, but by this time, the cold was spreading from my feet to the parts of my body where I try to think, so I would not vouch for that. And the consumption of psychiatric drugs per head of population in this region seems to be low and falling. And with that puzzle in mind, I skidded back through the snow to my hotel, to read Haruki Murakami’s rather wonderful little book, named What I Talk About When I Talk About Running – from which one can learn a great deal about what it is to be the certain kind of animal that is a human being, with a certain kind of body.

Next day, with rather less snow, it was back to the conference, for a very long interview for an Italian magazine, followed by a two and a half hour ‘author meets readers’ session on my book The Politics of Life Itself which has recently come out in Italian. To my surprise, lots of people came along and I found myself signing dozens of copies – a deeply embarrassing experience. It was an honour to have my book introduced by Dr Rotelli himself, and by Pier Aldo Rovatti, a leading Italian philosopher, editor of the journal Aut Aut – in which, coincidentally, the first version of my argument on ‘the politics of life itself’ was published. My translator was Erik Schneider, the American Joyce scholar and curator of the Joyce Museum in Trieste – perhaps my translated words thus acquired a certain Joycean flavour.

Nevertheless, the themes of the discussions were familiar – where is the critique, what side am I on, surely we should be condemning all this biologisation and medicalisation, that condemns us to passivity in the hands of those who claim to know. I read contemporary developments in the life sciences rather differently. But in any event, one writes not to judge but to make judgement possible. Perhaps even, as Deleuze puts it somewhere, to have an end to judgement – not to feel obliged to conduct each study as if it was some kind of legal tribunal, to believe that by writing one had acquired the power to bring some miscreant to the dock and to pronounce a verdict ‘guilty as charged!’ – with all the dubious pleasure of self-righteousness that some find in this. I wanted also to explore the proposition –apparently rat-ified by Jacques Derrida in his last writings – that we should not be afraid to think that we are, in some crucial respects, animals. Very peculiar animals, it is true, but animals after all. Of course, that thought is contentious. Recall Goering’s notorious statements that Jews were like lice and that their extermination was delousing. A whole generation of post-war European philosophers reacted against the dire consequences of such animalisation of the human. And, if one wanted further reminder of the animalisation of the human, on the walls of the old asylum buildings in Trieste were many photographs of the conditions of the inmates, often naked, being ‘bathed’ with cold water from hoses - reduced to the state of animals. Closer to home, one finds the bankrupt animal analogies of the socio-biologists and evolutionary psychologists. And yet, as I struggle with my own work on the life sciences, I feel it important to try to grasp the new sense of our bodies and brains that is taking shape, and to overcome the reflex critique from the human sciences. That, I think, is the intellectual challenge for the human sciences for the next decades.

The conference was a heartening event despite the snow, the rather ‘spontaneous’ nature of the organization, and the fact that everyone was overwhelmed by the sheer numbers present – a heady mixture of high state officials, psychiatrists of all persuasions, NGO activists and former inmates, users and survivors of psychiatry. On my last evening in Trieste, in a local restaurant, I found myself by accident, in the midst of twenty or so trainee psychiatrists from across Europe who were attending the conference. They had been to my talks and were in a merry mood. What did it mean, they asked me among the multiple toasts to Michel Foucault and Franco Basaglia, to say that we humans were, after all, animals? Our answers that night are best left in the conviviality of that restaurant. But the question remains an important one as we struggle to grasp the ways new knowledges and technologies of life are changing what it means to be human.

Letter from Trieste continued…


ESRC Mid-Career Fellowship on the Politics of Bioterrorismby Filippa Lentzos

Eighty participants from around the globe and from a Bioterrorism formed one of the Bush Administration’s key security concerns over its two terms in office, and has, by one estimate, resulted in the expenditure of more than $50 billion on counter-bioterrorism since 9/11 and the ensuing anthrax letters in 2001. This emphasis seems set to continue, with the Obama administration’s newly published National Strategy for Countering Biological Threats highlighting that ‘We are fortunate that biological threats have not yet resulted in a catastrophic attack or accidental release in the United States. However, we recognize that: (1) the risk is evolving in unpredictable ways; (2) advances in the enabling technologies will continue to be globally available; and (3) the ability to exploit such advances will become increasingly accessible to those with ill intent as the barriers of technical expertise and monetary costs decline.’

¹ Rabinow, P (2003) ‘Afterword: Episodes or Incidents: Seeking Significance’ in Lakoff, A and Collier, S (Eds) Biosecurity Interventions: Global Health and Security In Question. New York: Columbia University Press. PP: 18-9.

The British Government, too, is seriously concerned with the threat of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, noting that ‘It is a challenge of a different nature to anything the world has faced before.’ It has outlined its efforts to tackle bioterrorism attacks on a number of occasions, most recently in the first National Security Strategy for the United Kingdom, which considers the nature of the new security challenges, how they have changed and how to respond appropriately.

Yet why is it that bioterrorism and biothreats have gained such prominence in the ‘risk portfolios’ of our political leaders when the limited historical examples available to us show that biological agents are difficult to weaponise and use with precision and with large-scale effects?

This is a question I will be exploring over the next couple of years with the support of an ESRC Mid-Career Fellowship. Treating biothreats as a social problem and focusing on the contingent processes whereby risks are identified, strategies developed, proposals tabled and choices made about appropriate action, I will consider what can loosely be termed ‘the politics of bioterrorism’ and the policies and policy networks developing around biosecurity. I will explore how groups of individuals and institutions are seeking to forward specific definitions and characterizations, how claims are being justified, and what the implications of these claims are for determining what needs to be done.

In my work on biosecurity over the last few years I have accumulated a large body of empirical material on this, but the constraints of contract research has meant that I have had little time to consolidate the material and to work through it systematically and theoretically. The Fellowship provides a unique opportunity for me to bring together my observations and experience of biosecurity-related policymaking with the intellectually rigorous social science environment of the LSE. It enables me, as Luhmann or Rabinow would describe it, to move from being a ‘first-order observer’ to a ‘second-order observer’, who, rather than seeking to proceed directly toward intervention and repair of the situation’s discordance, aims for a ‘modal change from seeing a situation not only as a given but equally as a question, to understand how, in a given situation, there are multiple constraints at work… but multiple responses as well’.

For more information on Dr Lentzos’s work, and the research on biosecurity at BIOS, please see: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/biosecurity/biosecurity.htm


Rapp’s talk focused on translational medicine and interdisciplinary work, as well as new forms of social and cultural innovation in the realm of the new brain sciences and learning disabilities. As she noted, scientific research is continually changing over time, resulting in new paradigms for understanding both basic research and its application. In specific, activism has influenced the way science is conducted which is interesting from an anthropological point of view.

Rapp’s fieldwork focused on cultural innovations of learning disabilities, with the increase in number of identified learning-disabled children. This group makes up 15 per cent of school aged children in the US, making them an expensive and difficult group to educate. A social map of learning disabilities has begun to develop and learning disabled activism has gained momentum.

Rayna Rapp, BIOS annual Lecture, 26 February 2010

The 5th Annual BIOS Public lecture took place on February 26, 2010, at LSE’s New Academic Building and was attended by nearly 100 participants. Our speaker this year was Professor Rayna Rapp, Professor of Anthropology at New York University, and one of the world’s leading anthropologists. The topic was ‘Chasing Science: Laboratory Inquiries, Children’s Brains, Family Labours’.

Rapp’s fieldwork included investigations of how families nurtured children with learning disabilities, and formed new kinds of alliances and partnerships to improve existing services and widen access to learning in general. She conducted participant observation in two paediatric scientific labs, neuroscience and psychiatric epigenetics labs looking at neuro-anatomy and neuro-plasticity. While neuro-genetics examines changes in gene expression, epigenetics represents a significant departure from previous models of genetic expression, as it emphasises changes during development and the activation of genes at different points in time, some of which may produce heritable consequences, giving a new role to the environment (formerly called Lamarckism). Modelling human behaviour through animal models allows us to investigate such complexities, but also poses daunting new experimental challenges. For example, investigating basic neuroscience capacities requires experimental models such as knock-out and knock-in mice to learn about gene functions. Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has given us the ability to determine how children with a diagnosis perform tasks differently than children controls, allowing us to see neurochemistry at work. Often differentiating children with diagnosis with childhood variance is difficult (children’s environments at home can dictate how they learn). These technologies are intertwined and used to gain knowledge on paediatric neuroscience and causes of learning disabilities.

Much interdisciplinary research is currently occurring in neuroscience, as a result of significantly increased funding for such initiatives. However a big issue in paediatric research on learning disabilities is the difficulty to recruit children. Although parents are interested in helping their children, they often have reservations about allowing them to participate in experimental studies. Sometimes child diagnosis can give information about familial genetic disabilities that had previously been unlabelled. Another question that still needs to be addressed, is when and how children should be medicated.

Diagnostic criteria are changing and it is difficult to determine what is a variant of childhood brain development and what is a learning disability. Neuroscientific diagnosis is dependent on agreement about epigenetic factors, environmental impacts, on neuroscience. As scientists are focusing on translating research to bedside, future research will be more translational and interdisciplinary.

In addressing these complexities, Rapp brought an ethnographic sensitivity to both the hope and the hype of the new brain sciences, while also keeping her eye closely focused on the challenges for user groups – both parents and children – in defining both the directions of scientific progress and the potential applications of its outcomes.

A podcast of the lecture can be found at: www.lse.ac.uk/resources/podcasts/publicLecturesAndEvents.htm

Notes from the 2010 BIOS Annual Lecture by Naomi Shuman


‘Whether or not we are about to enter a bio-age, a posthuman future or an era of genetic programming, developments in the ‘new’ life sciences have come to feature prominently in discussion and debate about humanity’s future.’

Wahlberg and Bauer, 2009:1

stored. The second theme that guides the book explores the negotiations between lay experiences and scientific knowledge, and is crucial for Malin Noem Ravn, Nete Schwennesen and Lene Koch’s chapters. In the latter, the scholars discuss how the process of parental risk assessment for Down’s syndrome intervenes in the ways women interpret themselves and the foetus they carry. The third theme of the book sees Adam Bencard and Ayo Wahlberg playing across the boundaries between biology and human sciences. Taking an empirical angle into clinical practices, Wahlberg’s chapter explores how biological understanding of genetic disease (eg, cystic fibrosis, spinal muscular atrophy and Down’s syndrome) juxtaposes with social norms in the definition of ‘quality of life’, severity and suffering. Finally, Amrita Mishra and Susan Bauer explore how practices (ie, ‘ways of doing’) have changed in parallel with the definition and re-definition of categories. In particular, Bauer shows the blurring of boundaries between fairly established categories (ie, nature and nurture, past and present) that followed the practices of risk estimations in Copenhagen.

This fascinating collection of essays succeeds in re-focusing our attention on the ways in which categories and categorization enter the life sciences and society more broadly speaking. The empirical focus features across the chapters, making the book readable and interesting to all kinds of life science scholars, and not necessarily

edited by Susanne Bauer and Ayo Wahlberg Book review by Valentina Amorese

just sociologists. The methodological differences that characterize the chapters exemplify how pervasive discourses of categories are in the life sciences, strengthening the book’s argument.

Although the structure is very clear and well described in the introduction, the book is never repetitive as the four main themes unfold dynamically in all the chapters. The only drawback perhaps was the lack of conclusions, which would have bolstered some of the arguments. Nevertheless, this perfectly reflects the openness of this field, which ultimately accounts for the originality of this book.

As noted in the epigraph, which is taken from Bauer and Wahlberg’s introductory chapter, life sciences have certainly become a dominant feature of modern societies. As such, they have become an area of interest for several scholars, including those in the field of the human sciences. In contrast to philosophers and bioethicists, who typically unfold their arguments by means of principles and theories, social scientists enter the empirical sites in which the life sciences take place (ie, laboratories, clinics, patients groups families etc). In this context, the editors of this volume have identified a gap in the literature that has been largely debating the prospects and perils of the life sciences. Thus, the aim of the book is to re-localize social inquiry in the study of the practices of contestation-stabilization and negotiation-reconfiguration. Engaging with the theme of categories and categorization, the book unfolds in a series of empirical studies, one in every chapter.

Methodology and theoretical frameworks are not necessarily shared across the chapters, which are organized around four main themes. In the first two chapters, Murray Goulden, Andrew Balmer and Cecil Palmer explore the category of human life. While the first two scholars explore the controversies surrounding the classification of Piltdown man and Homo floresiensis, Palmer looks at the emergence and implications of human categories as the dominant lens through which biological entities are understood, collected and

Contested Categories: Life Science in Society

Research updates


Contested Categories: Life Science in Society Joelle Abi-Rached

Research Officer

The Neuro-turn: Brain Self and Society in the 21st century

The aim of the ‘Brain Self and Society’ project¹ on which I have been closely working with Prof. Nikolas Rose for the past two and a half years, is to evaluate a specific hypothesis: that contemporary developments in the brain sciences are having as significant a social, political and personal impact in the twenty-first century as did the birth of psychological conceptions of personhood in the twentieth century.

In order to assess the hypothesis, it was necessary to trace the dynamics of the new brain sciences, in terms of their emergence, organization and transformation, as well as the spread and transmutation of their associated ways of thinking about human beings, their minds and brains. So I spent the first year of the project exploring the conceptual, methodological and technical mapping tools and their limitations. Although laborious and at times dispiriting, the mapping exercise – more specifically the genealogical and historical research – turned out be valuable as it made us identify a key moment in the ‘short present’ of the new brain sciences. This is the emergence of ‘neuroscience’ as a new science of the mind and along with it a new way of understanding and examining the brain and its interactions with mind and behaviour. We christened the birth of this new ‘style of thought’, the birth of the neuromolecular gaze.²

Another key element turned out to be the animalization of human behaviour. This led us to analyse more thoroughly the widespread use of ‘animal models’ in neuroscientific and psychiatric research. The analysis was not meant to critique their use rather to critically reflect on the many assumptions and presuppositions on which these models rest and the new problematics they create. Some of the findings were discussed in a workshop on ‘Translating Behaviour: Bridging Clinical and Animal Model Research’

organized by the European Molecular Biology Laboratory in Heidelberg last November.

But what I found particularly striking was the realization of the paucity of research on the history of the emergence of neuroscience as a discipline in its own right. A grasp of the historical development of this discipline is not only important to historians of science but perhaps more pertinently to sociologists of science and technology who have recently shown interest in the new brain sciences. This realization motivated me to start writing a paper on the history of neuroscience in the British context based on archival analysis as well as in-depth interviews with key scientists who witnessed the unfolding of that history. Besides my current focus, which is literally confined to Queen square, I started drafting some of the mutations in the discourse on traumatic memories. This will be a case study on how the new brain sciences have been infiltrating the language of the new ‘science of memory’ since its birth at the end of the 19th century through the pioneering work of the founder of French psychology Théodule Ribot, the great French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot and his student, the French psychiatrist and philosopher Pierre Janet.

The coming months will definitely be challenging but also exciting as they will involve lots of thinking and writing (including a book with Nikolas Rose on the findings of the three-year project), besides the organization of the concluding event of ‘Brain Self and Society’ planned for September 2010. This will be a one day symposium that will bring together leading neuroscientists, psychiatrists, historians, philosophers and sociologists to discuss the most crucial aspect of the project: personhood in the age of the brain.³

¹ www.lse.ac.uk/collections/brainSelfSociety/

² Abi-Rached, JM and Rose, N. (2010). The birth of the neuromolecular gaze. History of the Human Sciences (special issue on the brain sciences). 23(1): 11-26.

³ For more information please see: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/brainSelfSociety/personhood-in-a-neurobiological-age-symposium.htm

Joelle Abi-Rached and Btihaj Ajana

BioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSo-cietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocieties-BioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSoci-etiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesBioSocietiesVol. 5, Part 1 a special issue

As BioSocieties enters its fifth year, under new publishing arrangements with Palgrave Macmillan, we are delighted to publish a special issue on drugs and addiction. As well as providing important analyses of the key social and neurobiological issues raised by ‘the problem of addiction’, the papers in this issue show that dialogue between distinct and sometimes opposing epistemological and conceptual positions is both difficult and possible. The issue was edited by Howard Kushner, Scott Vrecko, and Deanne Dunbar. The articles in this special issue are the products of an interdisciplinary conference held in Atlanta, February 2009, entitled ‘Addiction, the Brain and Society’.

The Books Forum focuses on the heated debate about the psychopharmacological enhancement of cognitive performance and mood that has been raging among bioethicists. Sociologist Joseph Davis discusses two books, Andrea Tone’s The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers and David Herzberg’s Happy Pills in America: From Miltown to Prozac. While, pharmacopsychologist Boris Quednow looks at the German volume Neuro-Enhancement: Ethik vor neuen Herausforderungen, edited by Bettina Schöe-Seifert and colleagues.

Out now!


Btihaj AjanaPhD candidate

‘Biopolitics and Bioethics of Biometrics: ID cards and the will to low risk identities’

After an extended period of just seeing a tunnel at the end of the light, I am finally starting to see now that famous light at the end of the tunnel. Hopefully it’s not the light of a coming train – well, we’ll see what the examiners will come up with.

My PhD thesis looks at the UK biometric identity cards project and other related developments as examples for thinking about some of the transformations taking place vis-à-vis the governance of society. It argues that some of these transformations unfold in the field of biopolitics, that is, the management of life whereby notions such as identity, citizenship, belonging, entitlement, access, etc. are increasingly being reconfigured in the name of risk and security, and made amenable to securitisation and control through the merging of body and technology. Two overarching and illustrative figures are being juxtaposed in this work, namely the ‘neoliberal citizen’ and the ‘asylum seeker’, this, in an attempt to uncover the complex and aporetic character of such contemporary forms of governing.

The first main enquiry of this thesis relates to the issue of ‘function creep’of biometrics and identity cards. It takes as its starting point the argument that the

current debates on this issue have been largely restricted to technologically determinist approaches in which other (political) concerns are being precluded. In response to this, the thesis draws on Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of the notion of ‘exception’ and biopolitics as an alternative way of analysing the spill-over of biometric technology. Nevertheless, I argue that this ‘totalising’ spill-over of biometrics does not affect everyone in the same way, nor has the notion of exception become somewhat generalisable and homogenous. Instead, this expansionary move is underlined by a polysemic feature which facilitates the selection of those to be surveilled and the normalisation of the rest.

The second enquiry examines the ways in which biometrics is about the ‘uniqueness’ of identity. Here, I take cue from the ontological and epistemological distinctions between the ‘what’ and the ‘who’ elements of a person (Cavarero; Arendt), and between the ‘idem’ and ‘ipse’ versions of identity (Ricoeur). By engaging with these philosophical distinctions and concepts, and with particular reference to the case of asylum policy, this

section of the thesis explores some of the (bio)ethical issues pertaining to the practice of biometric identification.

The last two enquiries redirect the focus towards the figure of the ‘citizen’ and explore how the securitisation of identity through biometric technology and ID cards is reconfiguring the meaning and function of citizenship. They draw on the governmentality thesis to address the specific rationalities, discourses and sites that are exemplary of the mutations currently occurring within the domain of citizenship governance. I argue that ‘biometric citizenship’ is at once a ‘neoliberal citizenship’ (Rose; Ong), a ‘biological citizenship’ (Novas and Rose), and a ‘neurotic citizenship’ (Isin). To critically reflect upon these mutations, I invoke the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, specifically his questioning of the notion of community, ontology and the political.

Overall, this research aims to make an original contribution to the sociological study of security and its interplay with the body and governance, and to the philosophical debates regarding the status of identity in the midst of increasing technologisation.

Postcards to BIOS


David Reubi Dear All

Although it is barely more than a year since I finished my PhD and left the BIOS Centre in early 2009, it feels like much longer given all what happened in my professional life during these last fourteen months.

I spent the first half of 2009 as a fellow at both the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at LSE and the Brocher Foundation in Geneva. This, of course, involved a lot of commuting which was more exhausting than exhilarating. But, even so, it turned out to be a rather productive period. It allowed me, first of all, to start disseminating the findings from my doctoral research the genealogy of bioethics and its impact on subjectivities in the UK and Singapore. These dissemination efforts included: submitting articles for publication, two of which have already been accepted,* running a seminar at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL and setting up, together with Alasdair Cochrane a new research group on Human Rights and Bioethics. At the same time, I also used this period to explore the field in which I wanted to carry out my future research: Global Health Governance (GHG), which is a new way to think and govern public health characterised by a particular assemblage of knowledges, experts and techniques. This exploration includes meeting people working in this field within Geneva-based organisations (World Health Organisation; Global Fund; World Economic Forum) and building contacts with the GHG Programme at

the Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies in Geneva, where I also gave a guest lecture.

In July 2009, I moved up the road, at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), where I was offered a three-and-a-half year research fellowship. My new position is part of a wider research project on GHG conducted at both the LSHTM and the University of Aberystwyth and funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Combining archival work, interviews and fieldwork, my role is to explore two separate areas of GHG. The first one is the ensemble of current public health strategies to control and reduce the production and consumption of tobacco in the Global South. I will analyse the conceptual, material and political conditions that enabled a transnational network of public health experts to elaborate these strategies and incorporate them into the 2003 WHO Framework Convention for Tobacco Control. I also hope to study three initiatives implementing these strategies in Southeast Asia run by local NGOs and funded by the Bloomberg and Gates foundations, examining how the strategies are altered and resisted by health activists and participants. The second area of GHG I will study is the international human rights and health movement. I am, especially, interested in analysing the development of qualitative indicators supposed to measure progress in the field of health and human rights and to be applicable universally.

The possibility to work on a large ERC project on GHG for over three years was not the only reason that made me

* The two articles are: (1) ‘A Reputation-Enhancing Infrastructure – a Genealogy of Biomedical Research Ethics in Singapore,’ International Political Sociology, June 2010; and, (2) ‘Blood Donors, Modernisation and Nation-Building: Configurations of Biological Sociality and Citizenship in Post-Colonial Singapore,’ Citizenship Studies, October 2010

accept this new position. The other reason was the opportunity to work at the LSHTM. Ranked among the UK’s three best universities in the last RAE and holder of the 2009 Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation Award, the LSHTM is a vibrant, research-oriented institution where a variety of innovative projects are being run, from medical research on vaccines against malaria to genealogies of post-1960s UK drug policies and anthropological studies of medicine in contemporary Africa.

Hopefully, 2010 should be yet another busy and exciting year. Besides going and doing fieldwork in Geneva, New York and Southeast Asia, I will have to run a few lectures for the courses on Medical Anthropology as well as Globalisation and Health. I also plan to publish two additional articles from my PhD thesis and to start writing papers from my new research on GHG. Furthermore, I plan to develop my research networks. This, of course, includes strengthening my ties I have with both former and current members of the BIOS community. So, for example, I will present a paper at the International Conference on the History of Medicine in Southeast Asia together with Ayo Walhberg this summer. I also discussed with Linsey McGoey about the possibility of running a reading group on health and economics. Furthermore, I hope I can come and present the results of my new research at one of BIOS’s future seminar series.

With best wishes, David

Postcards to BIOS continued…


I’m sad to announce that you will no longer have the pleasure of seeing me every day at my desk in front of Sabrina and Victoria’s office. I realise that my departure will distress you, leaving you with a shocking and traumatising experience of loss. So, to make amends, I’ll endow you with a postcard from Denmark, which should help to relieve your feelings of despair.

Don’t worry – Sima and I are doing fine back in Aarhus. And – jokes aside – we’ll be moving to Copenhagen on April 1st – just enough time for us to be able to settle in before two become three. Hopefully I’ll be able to come a long way with writing up my dissertation before diapers and sleepless nights become part of our reality.

I would like to say to everyone I’ve met during my stay in BIOS from Sept. 2009 – March 2010 that it has been a fantastic experience on many accounts. Thanks to Nikolas for the invitation and for good supervision. The presentations and discussions we’ve had in our Wednesday reading groups and roundtables have inspired me greatly to shape the form and content of my own work further. I’ll miss these times with coffee, cakes and a good chat. Most importantly I’ll miss the friendship and support that I found at BIOS. Thank you all for having made us feel at home in London.

Luckily, it is less a goodbye than a ‘see you soon’. During my stay I’ve had the opportunity to work together with many of you. Our readings of Georges Canguilhem in particular will be a platform for future collaboration. I’ll be looking forward to seeing some of you again in Denmark next year, when we are going to follow up on this work.

All the best, Anders Kruse Ljungdalh

Anders Kruse Ljungdalh


Publications, lectures and conference presentations by BIOS staff, associates and students

Publications

Abi-Rached, JM and Rose, N (2010). The birth of the neuromolecular gaze. History of the Human Sciences (special issue on the brain sciences). 23(1): 11-26.

Franklin, Sarah 2009 ‘Foreword: Making bodies, persons and families’ in Willemijn de Jong and Olga Tkach, eds Making Bodies, Persons and Families: Normalising Reproductive Technologies in Russia, Switzerland and Germany Zurich and Berlin: LIT Verlag, pp 7-9.

Friese, C (2010) Classification conundrums: Categorizing chimeras and enacting species preservation. Theory and Society 39(2): 145-172.

Jackson, E (2010) Medical Law 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Klein, K (2010) Book Review: The Limits to Governance: The Challenge of Policy-Making for the New Life Sciences, Ed. by Lyall, C, T Papaioannou and J Smith, Ashgate. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy: a European Journal. Published online, February 12th 2010.

Rose, N (2010) Normality and pathology in a biomedical age, in B Carter and N Charles, eds. Nature, Society and Environmental Crisis, pp 66-83, Wiley-Blackwell.

Rose, N (2010) The somatic ethic and the spirit of biocapital, in J Yorke, Ed The Right to Life and the Value of Life Orientations in Law, Politics and Ethics, Ashgate.

Rose, N and Miller, P (2010) Political power beyond the state: problematics of government. British Journal of Sociology. 61(1): 271-303 (reprint of paper of 1992).

Rose, N (2010) Screen and Intervene: Governing Risky Brains. History of the Human Sciences, Special Issue on the new brain sciences. 23 (1): 79-105.

Schmid, Shahanah (2009) Assisted reproduction in Switzerland and Germany: regulative and social contexts. In: De Jong, W and O Tkach (eds), Making Bodies, Persons and Families. Normalising Reproductive Technologies in Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Lit Verlag: Zurich and Berlin, pp 57-71

Schmid, Shahanah (2009), Fertility science-as-culture: ambiguous nature, quantified abstractions and the making of normality. In: De Jong, W and O Tkach (eds), Making Bodies, Persons and Families. Normalising Reproductive Technologies in Russia, Switzerland and Germany. Lit Verlag: Zurich and Berlin, pp 201-219

Singh, I (2010) Cryptic Coercion. Hastings Center Report 40(1), 22-23.

PresentationsFranklin, S (2010) After Embryo Transfer: the future of biology, Keynote Address ‘The Spaces of Transbiology’ ESRC Workshop’, Wellcome Conference Centre, 18 January: London

Franklin, S (2010) ‘Perspectives Tour: 8 Rooms, 9 Lives’ Wellcome Collection, 2 March: London

Franklin, S (2010) Chair, ‘Which Career First’, Anne McLaren Commemorative Workshop, Christ’s College, 10 March: Cambridge

Friese, C (2010) Categorizing Chimeras and Enacting Species Preservation: Using Positional Maps to Unpack the Significance of a Debate. Department of Epidemiology. Umeå University, Umeå Sweden.

Rose, N (2010) Keynote address, Trieste 2010: What is ‘Mental Health’? Towards a global network of community health, International Meeting, Trieste 9-13 February 2010.

Upcoming BIOS events

BIOS • The London School

of Economics and Political

Science • Houghton Street

London WC2A 2AE

Tel: +44 (0)20 7955 6998

Fax: +44 (0)20 7955 6565

www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/

During term time, the BIOS research seminar series and BIOS reading group sessions are held regularly on Thursdays and Wednesdays respectively. The Thursday seminar series feature invited speakers to discuss their research on various social and ethical aspects of the life sciences and biomedicine, while the reading group facilitates discussion around a series of topics that are of interest to persons associated with BIOS or who have an interest in the life sciences throughout the LSE and beyond.


Dates for your calendar April – September 201030 April 2010 The Impact of Impact Time: TBA Organised in association with the Department of Sociology and D302, LSE the Gender Institute. Check BIOS website for more details www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/

events/forthcoming_events.htm

17 June 2010 Seminar by Professor Arthur Frank (University of Calgary) 6-7.30pm [Title to be confirmed]. NAB LG03 (NAB, LSE)

18 June 2010 Workshop: ‘Self-Health’: A Workshop on the New 9am-4pm Forms of Patients’ Narratives, Subjectivities and Ethicsin Healthcare NAB LG03 Chair: John MacArtney (New Academic Building, LSE) Featuring: Professor Arthur Frank (University of Calgary) Call for papers out now! For more information, see the BIOS website or

contact John MacArtney: [email protected]

24 June 2010 BIOS Seminar: Governing conduct in the age of the brain 5-7pm Speaker: Professor Nikolas Rose, Martin White Professor of Sociology; T206 (2nd floor, Director, BIOS Centre, LSE Lakatos building), LSE For more details, please check: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BIOS/events/

past_events/pastseminars/Rose_10.htm

13 September 2010 Symposium: Personhood in a Neurobiological Age 9am-7.30pm Speakers include: Jean-Pierre Changeux, Catherine Malabou, The Wolfson Theatre Anne Harrington, Sean Spence, Michael Hagner, and Alain Ehrenberg (New Academic Building, LSE) Chair: Nikolas Rose Pre-registration is required. For more details please check: www.lse.ac.uk/collections/brainSelfSociety/personhood-in-a-

neurobiological-age-symposium.htm

BIOS Reading Group The Reading Group will be meeting one Wednesday per month from 1-3pm. Check the BIOS website for an updated Summer Term programme, room details and reading list.

BIOS Roundtables BIOS roundtables will continue in the Summer Term aiming at exploring shared interests in the BIOS community, and to address problems, issues, and concerns encountered. See BIOS Sharepoint for dates and to sign up!

bios news issue 15. summer 2010

Documents

pages of bios news

wonderful bios annual

particular ways of thinking

fantastic summer term

valentina amorese

david reubi

esrc midcareer fellowship

joelle abirached