Journal – Page 4 – Antimicrobials in Society

The politics of care in technoscience

In this special issue of Social Studies of Science, each contributor approaches the topic of care within technoscience with a lens that privileges the power relations that entangle humans and more-than-human others, carefully articulating “a feminist politics of care” (626). These articles each grapple with ‘darker’ sides of care: “The essays in this Special Issue speak to this complexity, showing how acts of care are always embroiled in complex politics. Care is a selective mode of attention: it circumscribes and cherishes some things, lives, or phenomena as its objects. In the process, it excludes others. Practices of care are always shot through with asymmetrical power relations: who has the power to care? Who has the power to define what counts as care and how it should be administered? Care can render a receiver powerless or otherwise limit their power. It can set up conditions of indebtedness or obligation. It can also sediment these asymmetries by putting recipients in situations where they cannot reciprocate. Care organizes, classifies, and disciplines bodies. Colonial regimes show us precisely how care can become a means of governance. It is in this sense that care makes palpable how justice for some can easily become injustice for others…How then do we grapple with and ‘unsettle’ easy assumptions about care” (627).

Each of these articles in this Special Issue consider this final question.

Caring for nanotechnology? Being an integrated social scientist, by Ana Viseu

One of the most significant shifts in science policy of the past three decades is a concern with extending scientific practice to include a role for ‘society’. Recently, this has led to legislative calls for the integration of the social sciences and humanities in publicly funded research and development initiatives. In nanotechnology – integration’s primary field site – this policy has institutionalized the practice of hiring social scientists in technical facilities. Increasingly mainstream, the workings and results of this integration mechanism remain understudied. In this article, I build upon my three-year experience as the in-house social scientist at the Cornell NanoScale Facility and the United States’ National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network to engage empirically and conceptually with this mode of governance in nanotechnology. From the vantage point of the integrated social scientist, I argue that in its current enactment, integration emerges as a particular kind of care work, with social scientists being fashioned as the main caretakers. Examining integration as a type of care practice and as a ‘matter of care’ allows me to highlight the often invisible, existential, epistemic, and affective costs of care as governance. Illuminating a framework where social scientists are called upon to observe but not disturb, to reify boundaries rather than blur them, this article serves as a word of caution against integration as a novel mode of governance that seemingly privileges situatedness, care, and entanglement, moving us toward an analytically skeptical (but not dismissive) perspective on integration.

Abyssal intimacies and temporalities of care: How (not) to care about deformed leaf bugs in the aftermath of Chernobyl, by Astrid Schrader

Prompted by a classroom discussion on knowledge politics in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster, this article offers a reading of Hugh Raffles’ Insectopedia entry on Chernobyl. In that entry, Raffles describes how Swiss science-artist and environmental activist Cornelia Hesse-Honegger collects, studies, and paints morphologically deformed leaf bugs that she finds in the proximity of nuclear power plants. In exploring how to begin to care about beings, such as leaf bugs, this article proposes a notion of care that combines an intimate knowledge practice with an ethical relationship to more-than-human others. Jacques Derrida’s notion of ‘abyssal intimacy’ is central to such a combination. Hesse-Honegger’s research practices enact and her paintings depict an ‘abyssal intimacy’ that deconstructs the oppositions between concerns about human suffering and compassion for seemingly irrelevant insects and between knowledge politics and ethics. At the heart of such a careful knowledge production is a fundamental passivity, based on a shared vulnerability. An abyssal intimacy is not something we ought to recognize; rather, it issues from particular practices of care that do not identify their subjects of care in advance. Caring or becoming affected thus entails the dissociation of affection not only from the humanist subject, but also from movements in time: from direct helping action and from the assumption that advocacy necessarily means speaking for an other, usually assumed to be inferior.

Making time for soil: Technoscientific futurity and the pace of care, by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa

The dominant drive for understanding soil has been to pace its fertility with human demand. Today, warnings about soil’s exhaustion and endangered ecology raise concerns marked by fears of gloomy environmental futures, prompting scientists and soil practitioners urgently to develop better ways of taking care of soils. Yet the pace required by ecological soil care could be at odds with the predominant temporal orientation of technoscientific intervention, which is driven by an inherently progressivist, productionist and restless mode of futurity. Through a conceptual and historical approach to the soil sciences and other domains of soil knowledge, this article looks for soil ontologies and relations to soil care that are obscured by the predominant timescape. Contemporary discussions of the future of the soil sciences expose tensions between ‘progress as usual’ – by intensifying productivity – and the need to protect the pace of soil renewal. The intimate relation of soil science with productionism is being interrogated, as ecology attempts to engage with soil as a living community rather than a receptacle for crops. In this context, and beyond science, the ‘foodweb’ model of soil ecology has become a figure of alternative human–soil relations that involve environmental practitioners in the soil community. Reading these ways of making time for soil as a form of ‘care time’ helps to reveal a diversity of more-than-human interdependent temporalities, disrupting the anthropocentric appeal of predominant timescales of technoscientific futurity and their reductive notion of innovation.

Unsettling care: Troubling transnational itineraries of care in feminist health practices, by Michelle Murphy

Responding to the call by Maria Puig de la Bellacasa for Science and Technology Studies to take up ‘matters of care’, this article cautions against equating care with positive feelings and, in contrast, argues for the importance of grappling with the non-innocent histories in which the politics of care already circulates, particularly in transnational couplings of feminism and health. The article highlights these histories by tracing multiple versions of the politics of care in a select set of feminist engagements with the pap smear and cervical cancer. Drawing on postcolonial and indigenous feminist commitments, as well as amplifying Donna Haraway’s call to ‘stay with the trouble’, the article seeks to disturb hegemonic histories and arrangements of race, colonialism, and political economy, while simultaneously valuing divergent multi-local itineraries as relevant to technoscientific matters of care. This call for a politics of ‘unsettling’ care strives to stir up and put into motion what is sedimented, while embracing the generativity of discomfort, critique, and non-innocence.

Care in context: Becoming an STS researcher, by Melissa Atkinson-Graham, Martha Kenney, Kelly Ladd, Cameron Michael Murray, Emily Astra-Jean Simmonds

This collaborative article, written by graduate students who attended the Politics of Care in Technoscience Workshop, brings the themes in this volume to bear on their own developing science and technology study projects and research practices. Exploring the contours of five specific moments where questions of care have arisen in the course of their everyday research, they do not find a single or untroubled definition of care; instead, care is often a site of ambivalence, tension, and puzzlement. However, despite this uneasiness, they argue that taking the time to reflect on the multiple, sometimes conflicting, forms and definitions of care within a specific research context can inform the way that science and technology studies scholars envision and conduct their work.

Applying medical anthropology in the control of infectious disease

This paper focuses on two roles of anthropology in the control of infectious disease. The first is in identifying and describing concerns and understandings of disease, including local knowledge of cause and treatment relevant to disease control. The second is in translating these local concerns into appropriate health interventions, for example, by providing information to be incorporated in education and communication strategies for disease control. Problems arise in control programmes with competing knowledge and value systems. Anthropology’s role conventionally has been in the translation of local concepts of illness and treatment, and the adaptation of biomedical knowledge to fit local aetiologies. Medical anthropology plays an important role in examining the local context of disease diagnosis, treatment and prevention, and the structural as well as conceptual barriers to improved health status. National (and international) public health goals which respect local priorities are uncommon, and generic health goals rarely coincide with specific country and community needs. The success of interventions and control programmes is moderated by local priorities and conditions, and sustainable interventions need to acknowledge and address country-specific social, economic and political circumstances.

Feminist Theory, Embodiment, and the Docile Agent

In the last two decades one of the key questions that has occupied many feminist theorists is how should issues of historical and cultural specificity inform both the analytics and politics of any feminist project. Although this questioning has resulted in serious attempts at integrating issues of sexual, racial, class, and national difference within feminist theory, questions of religious difference have remained relatively unexplored in this scholarship. The vexed relationship between feminism and religious traditions is perhaps most manifest in discussions on Islam. This is due in part to the historically contentious relationship that Islamic societies have had with what has come to be called “the West,” but in part to the challenges contemporary Islamic movements pose to secular-liberal politics of which feminism has been an integral (if critical) part. In particular, women’s active support for a movement that seems to be inimical to their own interests and agendas, at a historical moment when more emancipatory possibilities would appear to be available to women, raises fresh dilemmas for feminists.

Viral Clouds

Through an index case in Tangerang, West Java, the Orthomyxoviridae virus H5N1 influenza became visible in Indonesia and propagated rapidly across the archipelago. This viral event incited fears of a human influenza pandemic, disrupting existing arrangements among species, peoples, institutions, and nations, and remaking their biopolitical relations and specific ontologies along the way. On the basis of ethnographic field work in technoscientific, agricultural, and security communities in Indonesia, this essay examines how a set of strains and species—the H5N1 influenza virus, wild birds, domestic poultry, and, finally, humans—combined with one another, and with ongoing Indonesian and transnational concerns over pandemic preparedness, biosecurity, and national integrity, to create a multispecies cloud. The concept of multispecies cloud refers to the narratives and material practices floating around the H5N1 event and its multiple species companions in Indonesia. As I conceptualize the cloudiness of H5N1, its key feature is the uncertainty of precisely what social and biological forms were interacting in the outbreak scenario or might consequently emerge as a consequence of entering into engagement with the virus. The influenza virus, as a quasi-species or cluster of genomes in any case of infection, is a potent source for exploring an array of biopolitical concerns in human communities that emerged alongside the virus. Risk, scale, and speculation are discussed in turn as rubrics for understanding the microbial and multispecies sociality of H5N1 influenza. Examples are drawn from the sciences of virology and ornithology, and the global health practice of disease communication, as well as from poultry agriculture.

Menopause, local biologies, and cultures of aging

Menopause marks the end of menstruation, once generally accepted as the closure of women’s reproductive lives. The current medical view of menopause, however, is as a pathological event with its own distinct set of symptoms and diseases. Researchers have described women as facing a dramatic increase in the risk of heart disease, osteoporosis, stroke, and Alzheimer’s, all as the result of the impact of changing hormone levels, particularly the decline in estrogen. The clinical literature has interpreted these findings in terms of the absolute necessity of replacing these lost hormones for all women who are menopausal regardless of any other physiological, social, or cultural characteristic they might possess. Using research done in Japan, Canada, and the United States, this paper challenges the notion of a universal menopause by showing that both the symptoms reported at menopause and the post-menopause disease profiles vary from one study population to the next. For most of the symptoms commonly associated with menopause in the medical literature, rates are much lower for Japanese women than for women in the United States and Canada, although they are comparable to rates reported from studies in Thailand and China. Mortality and morbidity data from these same societies are used to show that post-menopausal women are also not equally at risk for heart disease, breast cancer, or osteoporosis. Rather than universality, the paper suggests that it is important to think in terms of “local biologies”, which reflect the very different social and physical conditions of women’s lives from one society to another.

Globalisation in Practice

This paper is about ‘material politics’. It argues that this may be understood as a material ordering of the world in a way that contrasts this with other and equally possible alternative modes of ordering. It also suggests that while material politics may well involve words, it is not discursive in kind. This argument is made for the mundane and material practice of boiling pigswill that the 2001 UK foot and mouth outbreak showed to have a layered importance. Boiling pigswill was a political technique in at least three different ways. First it made difference, dividing the rich from the poor by separating disease free countries from those in which foot and mouth is endemic. Second, it joined times and places by linking past agricultural practices with those of the contemporary world, and linking Britain with the world. And third, it also showed a way of limiting food scarcity on a world wide scale because it allowed food to be recycled, albeit on a small scale, in a region of plenty. ‘Politics’ is often linked to debate, discussion, or explicit contestation. Alternatively, it is sometimes seen as being embedded in and carried by artefacts. For the case of boiling pigswill neither approach is satisfactory. The first privileges the life of the mind while in the second politics is linked too strongly to a single order. The version of politics presented here foregrounds both materiality and difference. And it involves articulation: the question is not whether something is political all by itself but whether it can be called political as part of the process of analysing it.

The Actor-Enacted

This chapter analyses the question of agency considering the animal agency of Cumbrian sheep in the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in the UK in 2001. The article explores the conditions required for an actor to be able to act as such. In that direction it shifts the usual meaning of the concept of actor separating it from the anthropocentric model and making it distant from the ideas of “intentionality” and “dominance” to emphasise how actors not only act, but they are habilitated and produced as such as a result of complex relations with other actors. That is, to become actors they have to be enacted. To do so, the article analyses some of the multiple forms in which Cumbrian sheep were enacted in the context of the uprising of foot-and-mouth disease in 2001. Finally the article considers what types of agency perform the Cumbrian sheep in each of them.

The Politics and Poetics of Infrastructure

Infrastructures are material forms that allow for the possibility of exchange over space. They are the physical networks through which goods, ideas, waste, power, people, and finance are trafficked. In this article I trace the range of anthropological literature that seeks to theorize infrastructure by drawing on biopolitics, science and technology studies, and theories of technopolitics. I also examine other dimensions of infrastructures that release different meanings and structure politics in various ways: through the aesthetic and the sensorial, desire and promise.

Antibiotic Resistance and the Biology of History

Landecker’s (2015) work on antibiotics explores how the meanings associated with terms such as ‘antibiotic resistance’ or ‘microbes’ can shift both historically, but also in different contexts, demonstrating the effects of scientific knowledge on the world, its potential limitations, and the way alternatives can be side-lined or ignored as a consequence. In this paper, Landecker draws attention to how the promotion and use of antibiotics for human and animal health (and growth) is now evident as biological fact, not only in the bacterias that they were designed to target (i.e. through creating selection pressures for resistance strains), but also the biology and ecology of soils, water, and animals, as well as our own guts. In other words, antibiotics have transformed human-bacteria relations and associated infections, which has in turn changed the biology of bacteria (resistance or death) itself, potentially rendering the sustainability of current antibiotic-related practices ineffective. In short, antibiotics transformed humans and bacteria, which has consequently required humans to transform their relations to antibiotics; and also, potentially, to bacteria.

The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography

The term ‘Multi-species ethnography’ represents a new field of anthropology that takes seriously the lives and points of view of other-than-humans, whose lives are caught up in complex relations with human lives, politics, economies and cultures. As Eduardo Kohn writes on “the anthropology of life”, this is a mode of anthropology that exceeds a singular focus on human life, instead concerning itself “with the effects of our entanglements with other kinds of living selves” (2007:4). In this piece by Kirksey and Helmreich (2010) the reader is carefully introduced to these conjoined worlds and invited to consider how culture in the Anthropocene unfolds in our “mutual ecologies and coproduced niches” (546) with a diverse set of living things, be they mushrooms (Tsing 2015), meerkats (Candea 2010) forests (Kohn), marine microbes (Helmreich), plants (Hayden 2003; Archambault 2016), or the microorganisms that enliven our cheese (Paxson).

Much of this work – and more – has been collected at The Multispecies Salon.

Works cited:

Archambault, Julie Soleil. 2016. Taking Love Seriously in Human-Plant Relations in Mozambique: Toward and Anthropology of Affective Encounters. Cultural Anthropology, 31(2):244-271.

Candea, Matei. 2010. “I Fell in Love with Carlos the Meerkat”: Engagement and Detachment in Human-Animal Relations. American Ethnologist, 37(2):241-258.

Hayden, Cori. 2003. When Nature Goes Public: The Making and Unmaking of Bioprospecting in Mexico. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Helmreich, Stefan. 2009. Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2007. How Dogs Dream: Amazonian Natures and the Politics of Transspecies Engagement. American Ethnologist, 34(1):3-24.

Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Paxson, Heather. 2008. Post Pasteurian Cultures: The microbiopolitics of Raw-Milk Cheese in the United States. Cultural Anthropology, 23(1):15-47.

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2015. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.