This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation.

"This book explores the political, economic, social, and environmental health relations and politics of the global tech and electronics industry. Peter Little argues that, in the digital age, we need greater synthesis of political ecology, ethnography, and technocapital critique"--

With contributions from a diverse team of global authors, this cutting-edge Handbook documents the impact of the study of gender and sexuality upon the foundational practices and precepts of anthropology. Providing a survey of the state-of-the-art in the field, it is essential reading for academic researchers and students of anthropology.

Proceedings of an International Workshop held in Sheffield, UK, September 1-4, 1997

South Asia and Latin America represent two epicenters of migrant care work and the globalized reproductive market. Yet scholars and the media continue to examine them in geographical and conceptual isolation. South of the Future closes both these gaps. It investigates nannying, elder care, domestic work, and other forms of migrant labor in the Americas together with the emerging "Wild West" of biotechnology and surrogacy in the Indian subcontinent. The volume is profoundly interdisciplinary and includes both prominent and emerging scholars from a wide variety of fields, including anthropology, law, literary and cultural studies, science and technology studies, and social policy. These contributors speak to the dynamic, continually changing facets of the nexus of care and value across these two key regions of the global south. By mobilizing specific locations and techno-economics and putting them into dialogue with one another, South of the Future rematerializes the gendered, racialized bodies that are far too often rendered invisible in structural analyses of the global south, or else are confined to particular geo- and biopolitical paradigms of emerging markets. Instead, these bodies occupy the center of a global, highly financialized economy of creating and sustaining life.

Why the global health project to avert emerging microbes continually fails In 1989, a group of U.S. government scientists met to discuss some surprising findings: new diseases were appearing around the world, and viruses that they thought long vanquished were resurfacing. Their appearance heralded a future perpetually threatened by unforeseeable biological risks, sparking a new concept of disease: the “emerging microbe.” With the Cold War nearing its end, American scientists and security experts turned to confront this new “enemy,” redirecting national security against its risky horizons. In order to be fought, emerging microbes first needed to be made perceptible; but how could something immaterial, unknowable, and ever mutating be coaxed into visibility, knowability, and operability? Microbial Resolution charts the U.S.-led war on the emerging microbe to show how their uncertain futures were transformed into objects of global science and security. Moving beyond familiar accounts that link scientific knowledge production to optical practices of visualizing the invisible, Gloria Chan-Sook Kim develops a theory of “microbial resolution” to analyze the complex problematic that arises when dealing with these entities: what can be seen when there is nothing to see? Through a syncretic analysis of data mining, animal-tracking technologies, media networks, computer-modeled futures, and global ecologies and infrastructures, she shows how a visual impasse—the impossibility of seeing microbial futures—forms the basis for new modes of perceiving, knowing, and governing in the present. Timely and thought provoking, Microbial Resolution opens up the rich paradoxes, irreconcilabilities, and failures inherent in this project and demonstrates how these tensions profoundly animate twenty-first-century epistemologies, aesthetics, affects, and ecologies.

Going beyond the narrow economic focus common to most books about globalization, All Together Now describes four kinds of global change-economic, political, cultural, biological-all of which are now accelerating, driven by the increasing mobility of symbols, goods, people, and non-human life forms. Anderson describes how we are entering an age of o