Changing Life Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities Peter J. Taylor, Saul E. Halfon, Paul N. Edwards, editors		$24.00 Paper ISBN: 0-8166-3013-5 ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3013-4
A fascinating look at how the culture of today’s life sciences affects our culture. 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, depending on where we stand. 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. The contributors, drawn from disciplines within science and technology studies and from geography, ecology, and developmental biology, provide a range of interpretive angles on the metaphors, narratives, models, and practices of the life sciences. Their 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. They consider such topics as the declining regulatory state, ascendant transnational networks, and capital's legal reign over intellectual property, life-form patents, and marketable pollution licenses. Changing Life argues that we cannot understand the power of the life sciences in modern society without exploring the intersections of science and technology with other cultural realms. To that end, this book represents a collective attempt to join the insights of science and technology studies and cultural studies. As a work of cultural politics, it makes a contribution to changing life in a context of changing social order. Contributors: Simon Cole, Scott Gilbert, Herbert Gottweis, Yrjö Haila, Rosaleen Love, Victoria and Richard A. Schroeder. Peter J. Taylor is Eugene Lang Professor of Social Change at Swarthmore College. Saul E. Halfon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Paul N. Edwards is senior research scholar and lecturer in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. 240 pages | 2 line art | 5 7/8 x 9 | 1997 Cultural Politics Series, volume 13 Contents Introduction Changing Life in the New World Dis/Order, Paul N. Edwards, Peter J. Taylor, and Saul E. Halfon The Terminator Meets Commander Data: Cyborg Identity in the New World Order, Paul N. Edwards Bodies of Knowledge: Biology and the Intercultural University, Scott F. Gilbert Genetic Engineering, Discourses of Deficiency, and the New Politics of Population, Herbert Gottweis Contradictions along the Commodity Road to Environmental Stabilization: Foresting Gambian Gardens, Richard A. Schroeder Discipline or Solidarity? Ecology as Politics, Yrjö Haila Overpopulating the World: Notes Toward a Discursive Reading, Saul E. Halfon How Do We Know We Have Global Environmental Problems? Undifferentiated Science-Politics and Its Potential Reconstruction, Peter J. Taylor Do Androids Pulverize Tiger Bones to Use as Aphrodisiacs? Simon A. Cole Bubbles in the Cosmic Saucepan, Rosaleen Love Afterword Shifting Positions for Knowing and Intervening in the Cultural Politics of the Life Sciences, Peter J. Taylor