Mobilizing Experimental Life: Spaces of Becoming with Mutant Mice

Copyright © 2013 SAGE Publications. Author's draft version; post-print. Final version published by Sage available on Sage Journals Online http://online.sagepub.com/This paper uses the figure of the inbred laboratory mouse to reflect upon the management and mobilization of biological difference in the contemporary biosciences. Working through the concept of shifting experimental systems, the paper seeks to connect practices concerned with standardization and control in contemporary research with the emergent and stochastic qualities of biological life. Specifically, it reviews the importance of historical narratives of standardization in experimental systems based around model organisms, before identifying a tension in contemporary accounts of the reproduction and differentiation of inbred mouse strains within them. Firstly, narratives of new strain development, foregrounding personal biography and chance discovery, attest to the contingency and situatedness of apparently universal biotechnological production. Secondly, discoveries of unexpected animal litters challenge efforts to standardize mouse phenotypes and control the reproduction of murine strains over space. The co-existence of these two narratives draws attention to the importance of and interplay between both chance and control, determination and emergence, and the making and moving of experimental life in biomedical research. The reception or denial of such biological excess reflects the distribution of agencies and the emerging spatialities of the global infrastructures of biotechnological development, with implications for future relations between animal lives and human becomings in experimental practice

Self-assembly, Self-organization, Nanotechnology and vitalism

International audienceOver the past decades, self-assembly has attracted a lot of research attention and transformed the relations between chemistry, materials science and biology. The paper explores the impact of the current interest in self-assembly techniques on the traditional debate over the nature of life. The first section describes three different research programs of self-assembly in nanotechnology in order to characterize their metaphysical implications: -1- Hybridization ( using the building blocks of living systems for making devices and machines) ; -2- Biomimetics (making artifacts mimicking nature); -3- Integration (a composite of the two previous strategies). The second section focused on the elusive boundary between selfassembly and self-organization tries to map out the various positions adopted by the promoters of self-assembly on the issue of vitalism

Reinventing grounded theory: some questions about theory, ground and discovery

Grounded theory’s popularity persists after three decades of broad-ranging critique. In this article three problematic notions are discussed—‘theory,’ ‘ground’ and ‘discovery’—which linger in the continuing use and development of grounded theory procedures. It is argued that far from providing the epistemic security promised by grounded theory, these notions—embodied in continuing reinventions of grounded theory—constrain and distort qualitative inquiry, and that what is contrived is not in fact theory in any meaningful sense, that ‘ground’ is a misnomer when talking about interpretation and that what ultimately materializes following grounded theory procedures is less like discovery and more akin to invention. The procedures admittedly provide signposts for qualitative inquirers, but educational researchers should be wary, for the significance of interpretation, narrative and reflection can be undermined in the procedures of grounded theory

Motivations for seeking experimental treatment in Japan

In this article on innovative medical treatment for serious conditions in Japan we aim to revise two widespread notions: first, that people living with severe conditions are all waiting for a cure or are impatient to try out experimental treatment, in particular regenerative medicine. Showing that motivations for cure seeking are complex and linked to somatic identity, we argue that gaining a cure also means a new social normality, which for some people narrows the only normality that is meaningful to them; and, second, that people living with a serious (latent) condition necessarily define their lives as not normal in the light of normalization. People with a condition conceptualise normal life variously and multiply in the light of both individual and collective experiences. The two revisions are crucial to attempts at understanding what makes people seek experimental medicine. Comparing the narratives of people with four different conditions – spinal cord injury, Duchenne muscular dystrophy, Diabetes Mellitus type 1 and cardiovascular disease – it becomes clear that the difference between seeking treatment or not largely depends on somatic identities; rather than through notions of (ab)normality, it is more adequately understood in terms of the experience of somatic lacking and wholeness

Captivating behaviour: mouse models, experimental genetics and reductionist returns in the neurosciences

This a post-print, author-produced version of an article accepted for publication in The Sociological Review. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Blackwell. The definitive version is available at www3.interscience.wiley.comNo Abstract availabl

Repelling neoliberal world-making? How the ageing–dementia relation is reassembling the social

Growing old ‘badly’ is stigmatizing, a truism that is enrolled into contemporary agendas for the biomedicalization of ageing. Among the many discourses that emphasize ageing as the root cause of later life illnesses, dementia is currently promoted as an epidemic and such hyperbole serves to legitimate its increasing biomedicalization. The new stigma however is no longer contained to simply having dementia, it is failing to prevent it. Anti-ageing cultures of consumption, alongside a proliferation of cultural depictions of the ageing–dementia relation, seem to be refiguring dementia as a future to be worked on to eliminate it from our everyday life. The article unpacks this complexity for how the ageing–dementia relation is being reassembled in biopolitics in ways that enact it as something that can be transformed and managed. Bringing together Bauman’s theories of how cultural communities cope with the otherness of the other with theories of the rationale for the making of monsters – such as the figure of the abject older person with dementia – the article suggests that those older body-persons that personify the ageing–dementia relation, depicted in film and television for example, threaten the modes of ordering underpinning contemporary lives. This is not just because they intimate loss of mind, or because they are disruptive, but because they do not perform what it is to be ‘response-able’ and postpone frailty through managing self and risk

The Brain and the Behavioral Sciences

The increasing visibility and sense of intellectual opportunity associated with neuroscience in recent years have in turn stimulated a growing interest in its past. For the first time, a general reference book on the history of science has seen fit to include a review of the history of the brain and behavioral sciences as a thread to be reckoned with within the broader narrative tapestry. On the one hand, this looks like a welcome sign that a new historical subfield has “come of age.” On the other hand, when one settles down to the task of composing a “state of the art” narrative, one realizes just how much these are still early days. The bulk of available secondary literature still swims in a space between nostalgic narratives of great men and moments, big “march of ideas” overviews, and an unsystematic patchwork of more theorized forays by professional historians into specific themes (e.g., phrenology, brain localization, reflex theory). The challenge of imagining a comprehensive narrative is made all the more formidable by the fact that we are dealing here with a history that resists any easy or clean containment within disciplinary confines. The paper trail of ideas, experiments, clinical innovations, institutional networks, and high-stakes social debates not only moves across obvious sites of activity such as neurology, neurosurgery, and neurophysiology but also traverses fields as (only apparently) distinct as medicine, evolution, social theory, psychology, asylum management, genetics, philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, computer science, and theology.History of Scienc

What is psychiatry? Co-producing complexity in mental health

What is psychiatry? Such a question is increasingly important to engage with in light of the development of new diagnostic frameworks that have wide-ranging and international clinical and societal implications. I suggest in this reflective essay that ‘psychiatry' is not a singular entity that enjoins consistent forms of critique along familiar axes; rather, it is a heterogeneous assemblage of interacting material and symbolic elements (some of which endure, and some of which are subject to innovation). In underscoring the diversity of psychiatry, I seek to move towards further sociological purchase on what remains a contested and influential set of discourses and practices. This approach foregrounds the relationships between scientific knowledge, biomedical institutions, social action and subjective experience; these articulations co-produce both psychiatry and each other. One corollary of this emphasis on multiplicity and incoherence within psychiatric theory, research and practice, is that critiques which elide this complexity are rendered problematic. Engagements with psychiatry are, I argue, best furthered by recognising its multifaceted nature