Increasingly, it seems, and throughout the world, inequalities of difference are locatable around fault-lines of access to, benefit from, control of technoscientific invention and deployment.  Whether we are speaking of technosciences of medicine and health, information and communication technologies, 'natural' industrial resources, or peace vs. hostilities, these departmental interests of people in first-world modernity shape humanity's differences as much as they foster a global ecumene. 

Through work in science studies inspired by variously feminist and subaltern studies, more clearly do we understand that the cultural dimensions of technoscience are central to the enterprise.  Furthermore, the complex networks of association that link laboratories to wider worlds take shape within politicoeconomic fields of inequality and difference.

Accordingly, we examine several of the key issues in peoples' variously situated engagement with technoscience as culture and practice.  Examining some exemplary sites of technoscientific regimes will, we hope, further our cultural understanding of its differentiating role in people's lives, as well as of the various inflections of technoscientific power, knowledge and agency.

Thursday afternoon, 3 May @ 1.30 PM
The Geopolitics of Global Technoscience
Technoscience is pursued beyond, or even without respect to, boundaries of nation-states and their political divisions.  As such enterprises have become 'global' ones by virtue of a colonial or transnational trajectory of development, in what ways have they transformed the cultural imaginary of local subjectivities?  For example how have they increased senses of vulnerability among local peoples?  How have they been changing understandings of national (or equivalent) citizenship in relation to 'humanity' or equivalent concepts of a worldwide ecumene?

Chair
Lisa Rofel

Peter W. Redfield
Univ. North Carolina, Anthropology
redfield@unc.edu
Provincializing Outer Space: The Half-Life of Empire

Karen-Sue Taussig
Program in Social Studies
Harvard University
taussig@fas.harvard.edu
Global/Local Negotiating: Genetic Practices in The
Netherlands

Marianne de Laet
Humanities & Social Sciences
California Institute of Technology
delaet@its.caltech.edu
Machines in Motion: Notes on Technology Transfer

Discussant
Sharon Traweek
Department of History
UCLA
traweek@history.ucla.edu

Thursday evening, 3 May @ 5.00 PM
David M. Schneider Memorial Lecture

Moderator
Virginia Dominguez, President, SCA
virginia-dominguez@uiowa.edu

Keynote Address
'The Problem of Anthropology'
Paul Rabinow
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Berkeley
rabinow@uclink4.berkeley.edu

Friday morning, 4 May @ 8.30 AM
Technoscientific NatureCulture: Ecologies of Power/Knowledge
Here, we are concerned with impacts of the insertion of technoscientific institutions into landscapes, whether 'natural' or sociocultural, and the differential consequences for groups of people who are recruited as workers, clients, 'neighbors,' etc.  How are landscapes of risk implied in technoscientific presence?  How are institutional cultural ecologies fashioned in respect of such enterprises' presence, and how do these relate to other ecologies?

Chair
Pauline Strong

Joseph P. Masco
Department of Anthropology
University of Oregon
jmasco@earthlink.net
Timebombs: On Colonizing the Future to Save the
Present in Los Alamos

Adriana M. Petryna
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Irvine
apetryna@uci.edu
Chernobyl Effects: The Science and Politics of
Exposed Populations

Hugh Gusterson
Department of Anthropology
MIT
guster@MIT.EDU
Ecological Knowledge and the Debate on Genetically
Modified Food

Discussant
Rena S. Lederman
Department of Anthropology
Princeton University
lederman@Princeton.edu

Friday afternoon, 4 May @ 1.30 PM
Infotechnics and the Horizon of Virtuality
As technoscience is increasingly mediated by computation and regimes of digital electronics, so are the wider societies in which such enterprise occurs and reshapes all forms of social mediation.  Infotechnics becomes a microcosm mediating a sociocultural macrocosm in a number of ways.  Who has access to infotechnics?  How is there differential mediation of people's lives because of this?  What utopian cultural visions emerge from the horizon of information technologies?

Chair
Roger Lancaster

Keynote Presentation
Allucquere Roseanne (Sandy) Stone
Dept. of Radio, Television & Film
University of Texas at Austin
sandy@actlab.utexas.edu
Slouching Toward Technotopia: The End of History
Came and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt

Discussant
Gary L. Downey
Center for Interdisciplinary Studies
Virginia Polytechnic University
downeyg@vt.edu

Elizabeth Povinelli
Department of Anthropology
University of Chicago
epovinel@midway.uchicago.edu

Saturday morning, 5 May @ 8.30 AM
Transspecific Biopolitics: Animals as Models and as Collaborators
Much of the research and development in bio-technoscience involves transspecific imaginaries and, arguably, cross-species social relationships.  Increasingly,  'animal models' act as human surrogates in the investigation of biological processes and medical treatments.  Meanwhile, cloned or transgenic organisms challenge conventional understandings of Nature at the same time that their presence has been increasingly normalized.  Both within the lab and beyond, such phenomena indicate more general cultural processes in which the social imaginary of the human Self is mediated by various animal Others in relation to our species.

Chair
Mac Marshall

Stefan G. Helmreich
Program in Humanities & Soc. Sci.
New York University
sgh2@nyu.edu
Trees and Seas of Information: Genomics and Alien
Kin Networks in the Deep Ocean

Deborah Heath
Dept. of Sociology & Anthropology
Lewis and Clark College
heath@lclark.edu
Of Mice and Molecules: Transspecific Anthropology
And Post-Genomic Science

Seung-Hoon Song
Department of Anthropology
George Washington University
hoonsong@gwu.edu
Animals Unmarked: How Social Class is Redeemed
In Animals

Discussant
Catherine Lutz
Department of Anthropology
University of North Carolina
lutz@email.unc.edu
 
Saturday afternoon, 5 May @ 1.30 PM
Contesting Science, Contested Science, 'People's Science'
How do groups of people engage scientific enterprise in terms of a concept of their own interests, especially as these are seen to differ from that of some official or otherwise institutional view?  How does activism present itself as the face of such engagement? How are discourses of 'rights,' of abuses of such rights, and remedies of abuses invoked in such modes of contestation?  What is the cultural construal of technoscience implicit in such engagement? And when do alliances contest conventional notions of expertise and activism?

Chair
Vincanne Adams

Kim Fortun
Dept of Science & Technol Studies
Rensselar Polytechnic Institute
fortuk@rpi.edu
fortun@albany.net
From Bhopal to Informated Environmentalism

Chaia Heller
Department of Anthropology
University of Massachusetts
cheller@anthro.umass.edu
Roquefort vs. GMOs: Peasant Expertise in the French
And Global Debate over Genetically Modified Foods

Manuela Carneiro da Cunha
Department of Anthropology
mm-cunha@uchicago.edu
Traditional People and Knowledge Regimes

Discussant
Rosemary Coombe
Division of Social Science
York University
r.j.c@sympatico.ca