Germ Wars

Armstrong, Melanie

doi:10.1525/california/9780520292765.001.0001

Cited by 9 publications

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“…Apart from characterising a current state of social and political life, the concept of immunity has also operated as a theoretical tool through which scholars interrogate and conceptualise communities and their embodied and political entanglements (Cohen, 2009;Esposito, 2011;Mutsaers, 2016). Such work has also included alternative conceptualisations of immunity, as in feminist and anti-racist revisions of immunity and bodily boundaries as always porous and blurry (Haraway, 1991;Armstrong, 2017).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Oikkonen

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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The article explores the concept of partial immunities-our past infections providing partial protection against new related epidemics-in order to develop feminist tools for rethinking communities and belonging as situated and inherently multiple. Partial immunities challenge the idea of immunity as defence/defeat and absence/presence, allowing us to approach immunity as never fully achieved and as arising from historical coincidence rather than personal strength. The article investigates these issues through influenza. It argues that partial immunities to influenza highlight the historical layering of communal ties and interspecies entanglements. The concept of partial immunities enables us to conceptualise belonging as multiple, constantly changing, and technologically enacted. The article develops this argument through two analyses, one focusing on current attempts to create a universal influenza vaccine and one centring on the ways in which past epidemics enact invisible immunological communities across time and space.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Oikkonen

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Office¹

2018

Feminist Encounters: A Journal of Critical Studies in Culture a

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Founded in 2017, Feminist Encounters is a journal committed to argument and debate, in the tradition of historical feminist movements. In the wake of the growing rise of the Right across the world, openly neo-fascist national sentiments, and rising conservative populism, we feminists all over the world are needing to remobilise our energies to protect and advance gender rights. Feminist Encounters provides a forum for feminist theorists, scholars, and activists to communicate with each other, to better educate ourselves on international issues and thus promote more global understanding, and to enhance our critical tools for fighting for human rights. Feminism is an intellectual apparatus, a political agenda, and a programme for social change. Critical analysis of how gender discourses produce cultural identities and social practices within diverse lived realities is key to this change. We need to think more sharply in order to strategise well: as the discourses of conservatism renew and invigorate themselves, so we as feminist scholars need to be refining our amazonic swords in order not just to respond effectively but also to innovate our own ideas for equality and social justice. We are, of course, committed to intersectionality, a vital lens through which to see the contours of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, age/ability, and explore how gendered scripts get lived, and filtered through these specificities of cultural organisation. Lived experience is never codified in terms of gender alone, and so our research will always be sensitive to the nexus of lived oppressions. The journal has a large editorial board and journal team, consisting of over forty scholars in twenty countries. This is deliberately inclusive in order that we can promote diversity and engage with different concerns from across the world. Our aim is not to simply talk to ourselves, reconfirming our localised assumptions, but to generate feminist encounters across regions, even if this is sometimes uncomfortable. Globalisation has been a triumph of neoliberalism, but digital technologies have also flattened and reduced the distance between us in dramatic ways, so that now we can talk to each other with unanticipated ease. This new access to each others' voices has also brought challenges to the way we think and do things, so that being a feminist today might be quite a different prospect to a person living in China, Iran, Norway, South Africa or the UK. Second Wave Feminism used the idea of 'sisterhood' to invoke solidarity between women. I've always rather liked Andrea Dworkin's claim, though, that: "Feminism is a political practice of fighting male supremacy in behalf of women as a class, including all the women you don't like, including all the women you don't want to be around, including all the women who used to be your best friends whom you don't want anything to do with anymore." The notion of sisterhood was challenged by Black feminists in the 1980s as being too conceptually white, thus bell hooks' trenchant critique that: "the idea o...

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Recipes for recombining DNA: A history ofMolecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual

Creager

2020

BJHS Themes

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Laboratory instructions and recipes are sometimes edited into books with a wide circulation. Even in the late twentieth century, publications of this nature remained influential. For example, protocols from a 1980 summer course on gene cloning at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory provided the basis for a bestselling laboratory manual by Tom Maniatis, Ed Fritsch and Joe Sambrook. Not only did the Molecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual become a standard reference for molecular biologists (commonly called the ‘bible’), but also its recipes and clear instructions made gene cloning and recombinant DNA technologies accessible to non-specialists. Consequently, this laboratory manual contributed to the rapid spread of genetic-engineering techniques throughout the life sciences, as well as in industry. As is often the case with how-to books, however, finding a way to update methods in this rapidly changing field posed a challenge, and various molecular-biology reference books had different ways of dealing with knowledge obsolescence. This paper explores the origins of this manual, its publication history, its reception and its rivals – as well as the more recent migration of such laboratory manuals to the Internet.

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Germ Wars

Cited by 9 publications

References 0 publications

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

Partial Immunities: Rethinking Communities and Belonging through Viral Memories of Influenza

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Recipes for recombining DNA: A history ofMolecular Cloning: A Laboratory Manual

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