Molecular Life

Abstract

An Invitation to the MolecularIt was caught by the wind, fl ung down on the earth, lifted ten kilometres high. It was breathed in by a falcon, descending into its precipitous lungs, but did not penetrate its rich blood and was expelled. It dissolved three times in the water of the sea, once in the water of a cascading torrent, and again was expelled. It travelled with the wind for eight years: now high, now low, on the sea and among the clouds, over forests, deserts, and limitless expanses of ice; then it stumbled into capture and the organic adventure. (Levi 1985 : 226) You are sitting in an overly air conditioned room at a geography conference. The chairs are uncomfortable and the lack of natural light tiring, but the talks are topical and important. They encompass a selection of contemporary social geography concerns, touching upon questions of identity and community, of inequality and justice, and of the production and experience of bodily difference. One presentation explores the viral socialities in the unfolding swine fl u pandemic: the exclusionary spatial practices of biosecurity, involving school closures and quarantines, alongside the cultivation of new forms of association in the form of fl u buddies and interspecies suffering. Another addresses the changing experience of corporeal difference through genetic counseling offered to populations at risk of inherited chromosomal alterations: making visible those individuals with affected recessive genes, at the same time as offering a space, through pre -implantation genetic diagnosis, to decide not to extend this particular community. A third traces the fate of human oocytes on the move: the technological processes which enable this vital entity to transfer from one body to another, and the transactional values -this much for this egg, that much for another -which remind us that not all bodies are marked the same. These

Experimenting with institutions in a 21st century age of “post‐truth”

“…Though historically rooted in the physical sciences through notions of the laboratory (Kohler, ; Latour, ; Thrift et al, ), Braun () discusses experiments as operating epistemologically differently to their historical roots. Rather than using technical apparatus in a controlled (Davies, ), “placeless” (Kohler, ), precise (Rheinberger, , ) and repeatable setting such as a laboratory and expecting a predicted outcome, experiments have, become increasingly thought of as iterative (Davies, ) and opportunities to produce and investigate difference . Experiments can redistribute.…”

“…Accordingly, experiments are increasingly being used in “wild” settings (Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, ; Hinchliffe, Kearnes, Degen, & Whatmore, ; Kullman, ; Lorimer & Driessen, ) beyond (some) laboratory controls, and recognising complexities, unknown factors and uncontrollability which have otherwise been reduced in historical laboratories (Gross, ; Gross & Krohn, ). Put another way, experiments are increasingly being used less to necessarily know the world and the processes within it, and more to help better understand them (Davies, ).…”

“…These challenges have therefore created significant associated demands of 21st Century scientific and research‐based institutions relating to knowledge production and modes of action, creating a chance to foster alternative ways of thinking and engaging in, and with, institutions. Experiments sit well‐placed to explore these opportunities, as creative, novel forms of “world‐making” (Davies, ), and this paper focuses on how experimenting with institutions may provide openings to help negotiate such urgent challenges.…”

Experimental geographies

“…Other sources name interdisciplinarity as a key feature of experimental research, as experimentation is frequently prompted by the perception of discipline‐specific methods as limited (see Davies 2011; Donaldson et al. 2010).…”

Biosecure citizenship: politicising symbiotic associations and the construction of biological threat

“…‘Symbiosis’, a familiar ecological concept that has come to refer to mutually supporting species, is derived from the Ancient Greek συμβ?ωσις ( sumbiōsis ), meaning ‘with life’, ‘living with’ or ‘living together’ (Liddell et al 1983 [1968]). Research within geography, sociology and philosophy is increasingly giving recognition to our interconnections ‘with life’ in the construction and understanding of self and other, human and nonhuman, by exploring and challenging these boundaries (Latour 1993; Whatmore 2002; Castree and Nash 2004; Bennett 2004; Bingham 2006; Braun 2007; Davies 2010). Donna Haraway (1991 2008) in particular calls human exceptionalism into question through the intimate shaping and integral biological co‐productions that are both inter‐bodily (such as multispecies ‘living together’, such as human and dog) and intra‐bodily (theorising the human ‘individual’, with human genomes to be found in only 10% of the cells that occupy the body, as a ‘knot of species coshaping one another in layers of reciprocating complexity all the way down’; Haraway 2008, 42).…”