Life, (Un)Ltd: A CSW Research Colloquium 2011-13
Principal Investigator:
Rachel Lee, Associate Director, CSW, and Associate Professor, Department of English and Gender Studies
The broad aim of the Life (Un)Ltd project is to bring
together three groups of stakeholders, those interested in postcolonial
and race studies, those doing feminist and queer theory, and those
working in science and technology studies and medical humanities to develop a broad-based inquiry
into the following questions:
How do biotechnologies both ameliorate and produce new health
disparities and augment the production of “expendable populations”? What
effects have blood transfusion, tissue engineering, transplantation,
IVF/gestational surrogacy, ES cell therapy, population genotyping, and
experiments in nutritive milieu—to name just a few developments--had on
feminist studies, especially those theorizing the circulation of
biomaterials in relation to race and (neo)colonialism? How have
non-normatively gendered bodies, poor women’s bodies, as well as
gestational body parts served as opportune sites and sources for medical
experimentation and the speculative contouring of life unlimited? What
methods (historical materialist, psychoanalytic, ethnographically
realist, deconstructive, cybernetic/systems theory) lend themselves to
this feminist bioscientific critique? To what extent have feminist
approaches to reproductive labor and childrearing (the emotional labor
of cultivating human life) made connections with bioscientific research,
practicalities, and ethics? Finally, how have literature and the arts
shaped and reflected upon the biomedical imagination?
Working Group
To explore these questions, CSW Associate Director Rachel Lee initiated a working group in Fall of 2011, bringing together twenty-five faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students from public health, humanities, and social sciences at UCLA to develop an interdisciplinary, feminist approach to developments in the biosciences that have effects on clinical practice, human rights, as well as philosophical and artistic practices.
MEMBERS OF THE WORKING GROUP
WORKSHOP MATERIALS FOR GROUP MEMBERS
Events in 2012-13
Oct 24, 2012
Life (Un) Ltd / Estrin Family Speaker Series on Women and Science: Three Times a Woman: A Gendered Economy of Stem Cell Innovation
Charis Thompson, Department of Gender and Women's Studies, UC Berkeley
Read blog posting
Read newsletter article
Watch video: Part I Part II
Feb 8, 2012
Genomic Testing Across the Lifespan, Institute for Society and Genetics workshop featuring Hannah Landecker, Stefan Timmerman, and others more info
May 7, 2013
Life (Un) Ltd / Estrin Family Speaker Series on Women and Science: Bitter Melancholy: Feminism, Depression, and Aggression
Elizabeth Wilson, Professor, Women and Gender Studies, Emory University
May 17, 2013: Cultural Politics of Seeds, a one-day symposium organized by Allison Carruth and Rachel Lee
more info
Events in 2011-2012
May 11, 2012: Symposium on Feminism, Race, and Biopolitics
With the aim of widening the Life (Un)Ltd network of interdisciplinary scholars to
include regional, national, and international researchers in the areas
of feminist STS, Life (Un)Ltd organized a public symposium on May 11, 2012.
The symposium featured both international and nationally renowned
speakers organized into two panels: Assisted, Distributed, Outsourced, Foreclosed: Pregnancy and Reproductive Science in Biotechnical Times and Metabolism, Medical Labor, and Toxic Milieux: Cross-Border Intimacies of Bioscience, Biopolitics, and Care.
The event was supported in part by UCLA Library, UCLA Office of Faculty Diversity and Development; Deans of the Humanities, Life Sciences, and Social Sciences at UCLA; the Partner University Fund project on 21st Century Cuisine, Nutrition and Genetics in France and the United States; the UCLA Institute for Society and Genetics; and the UCLA Department of English.
View program (pdf)
View bios of speakers
View videos of presentations (YouTube)
