Online Workshop: The Fantasy of Bio-

Sponsor: Department of Geography, Durham University (Geographies of Life, Economy & Culture, and Politics - State – Space Research Clusters)

This workshop will explore the emerging fantasy of the bio- in its various associations with economy, security, and politics. Proliferating biotechnological innovations produce various kinds of bioeconomy, ranging from the extraction of biomaterials from bacteria, algae, hogs, shrimp, and jellyfish for applications in manufacturing, pharmaceutical, and military industries amongst others; to the domestication of wild animals to reproduce them on farms or recover their populations in the wild. The proliferation of the bioeconomy provokes and resonates with the concept of biosecurity, as it relates to wildlife conservation and disease management in livestock, poultry, and salmon and shrimp aquaculture, and human-plant relations.

The practices of bioeconomy and biosecurity reveal further questions about the biopolitics of the human and nonhuman relations that are brought into being by these bio-interventions. Such questions include: What kind of imaginations or fantasies do bio-interventions reflect, reinforce or create? How is the ‘bio’ differentially understood and fantasized about across various epistemic communities?  Which ‘bios’ are used, extracted, exploited, secured, commodified, excluded and how? How are human and nonhuman relations reformed in different locations and environments?

The workshop will have 6 presentations given by international and departmental speakers: Dr Beth Greenhough (School of Geography and the Environment, the University of Oxford), Dr Alex Blanchette (Department of Anthropology, Tufts University), Dr Lauren Martin (Department of Geography, Durham University), Dr Elizabeth Johnson (Department of Geography, Durham University), Dr Hannah Dickinson (Department of Geography, Durham University), Mr Yu-Kai Liao (Department of Geography, Durham University). The workshop will be followed by discussion with Dr Helen Wilson (Department of Geography) as discussant, workshop participants and an invited external panel.

Schedule:

Registration

Please register in advance for the workshop at this link.

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Guest Speakers:

Dr Beth Greenhough, Associate Professor

School of Geography and the Environment, the University of Oxford

https://www.geog.ox.ac.uk/staff/bgreenhough.html

Dr Alex Blanchette, Associate Professor

Department of Anthropology, the University of Tufts

https://as.tufts.edu/anthropology/people/faculty/alex-blanchette

Abstract:

Dr Beth Greenhough

From terrain to terroir: Exploring the spatial imaginations of human microbiome research

In seeking to understand the boundaries between the normal and the pathological, health and illness, French vitalist philosopher George Canguilhem (1991) argued we need to pay attention to the role of terrains, a term he uses to define an organism’s resistance to pathogenic agents and predisposition to particular diseases. In this paper we argue that microbiomics necessitates new ways of imagining relations between people, place and pathology, which involve a shift from a focus on terrain (bodily resilience and predisposition) and towards terroir (terrain as a product of relationships between more-than-human communities and their lived environment). We illustrate our arguments with examples from recent science and popular science writing around probiotic or ‘dirty’ parenting, where microbiome science is drawn on to argue for the health benefits of childhood exposure to microbial diversity, as well as emerging concerns around the ‘toxic terroir’ of post-industrial ecologies.

Dr Alex Blanchette

Niche Vitality and the Slaughter of Exceptional Animals

This talk looks at emergent forms of industrial life and death in contemporary Chicago. Known as the meatpacking center of the world until the 1950s, many are surprised to learn that industrial slaughter still thrives in the environs of Chicago – albeit by developing niche operations for killing injured or unusual animal bodies that cannot be cut apart in large-scale, high-speed factories. New forms of industrial killing are being invented to handle the excess vitalities of corporate meat, and this process prompts me to think skeptically about the tendency to equate industrialism with Fordist mass-production.

Dr Lauren Martin

Bioeconomies of migration control

Outsourcing migration and border control has made confinement, encampment and exclusion an economic interest for private and public sector actors alike. These carceral economies ultimately depend on the migrants' liveliness, on their consumption of basic food and hygiene, and on their underpaid work while in confinement. Commodifying carceral space and care, in this context, produces a specific form of fungible migrant life, predicated on legal non-personhood, detainability and deportability.

Dr Elizabeth Johnson

Lives of Promise: Between Materiality & Fantasy in the Blue Economy

This presentation examines the circulation of marine biomaterials in the emerging Blue Economy. In it, I focus on how notions of "life" and its reproductive capacities feature within this promissory economy. Drawing on empirical research on the use of jellyfish, I question how materiality and its others are marshalled in the social sciences both analytically and toward the making of novel political and ethical frameworks.

Dr Hannah Dickinson

Frayed threads and broken circulations: Following fantasies of the chitosan bioeconomy

Following the circulation of the marine biomaterial chitosan through diverse scientific, technological, economic and policy settings, has revealed that the global chitosan bioeconomy is built upon and fuelled by a circulation of promises and fantasies. These promises are imbued upon material applications of chitosan; yet the real and fantastical threads holding these biotechnological innovations together often become unstitched and frayed, leading to dead-ends or breakpoints in the circulations I am trying to follow. This presentation offers a methodological reflection on following the frayed threads of chitosan bioeconomy circulations, and considers what frayed threads can inform us about the power and pitfalls of fantasies in driving biomaterial innovation.

Mr Yu-Kai Liao

Unpacking hydro-social lives in shrimp economies: domestication and industrial production in the hatchery

Due to climate change and saline water intrusion, shrimp economies are developed in the Mekong Delta as an adaptation strategy. This talk focuses on how shrimp economies are constructed and facilitated by shrimp domestication and industrial production in the hatchery. It proposes the concept of hydro-social life to understand how biological life forms and social forms of life are articulated by a set of techno-scientific practices and multi-species relations. This talk reviews the history of shrimp domestication in Japan, Taiwan, and the USA and visits governmental and private hatcheries in the Mekong Delta and Ninh Thuận.