This article investigates the biopolitical dimensions that have grown out of the union between biocapitalism and current science education reform in the US. Drawing on science and technology study theorists, I utilize the analytics of promissory valuation and salvationary discourses to understand how scientific literacy in the neo‐Sputnik era has deeply involved educational life in biocapitalist circuits of exchange and production. I lay out this emerging terrain of ‘futuricity’ through a biopolitical analysis of the National Academies highly influential policy recommendation (...) on science education, Rising Above the Gathering Storm as well as the Association of American Universities' National Defense Education and Innovation Initiative. Here it is argued that the educational subject usually seen as a site of human capital investment can better be understood as a ‘biovalue’ in at least two senses: the educational subject's body as a site of investment and as an extractable source of value directly related to the larger globally competitive regime of the rapidly growing bioeconomy. I conclude my analysis of the vital politics at play in the biocapitalist articulation of science education with an alternative model of scientific literacy that is based in what I call biodemocratic practices. I explore such a rereading of scientific literacy through the example of the GrowHaus—a sustainable urban farm situated in a marginalized community in a major US city. The GrowHaus offers a model of scientific literacy that rejects extractive ethics associated with biocapitalist production and instead promotes a sustainable and socially just practice of science. (shrink)

Global clinical trials depend on a range of standards in order for research results to be comparable. As standardization is more than a mere technical exercise, tensions can arise when things are not uniform. This paper uses empirical data from interviews with principal investigators as well as Clinical Research Organization and pharmaceutical industry representatives working in India’s clinical trial industry to critically examine the ways Indian researchers navigate quests for standardization. It turns the analytical lens to the often obfuscated work (...) of standardization aiming to transcend the biological and cultural specificity of research participants and research sites. Drawing on the concept of local biologies, it illustrates that the universal body presumed by clinical trial methodology is, in fact, a specifically Euro-American one: Indian participants not only need to be made globally comparable but also aligned with the drugs’ future consumers. Focusing on the tensions between biomedicine’s postulation of bodily universality and trial participants’ local biologies, this paper advances recent interventions problematizing the structural violence undergirding global clinical trials. It also contributes to the literature on local biologies in its discussion of how these are negotiated in Indian for-profit clinical trials. (shrink)

The new prominence given to science for economic growth and industry comes with an increased policy focus on the promotion of commodification and commercialization of academic science. This paper posits that this increased interest in commodification is a new steering mechanism for governing science. This is achieved by first outlining what is meant by the commodification of scientific knowledge through reviewing a selection of literatures on the concept of commodification. The paper concludes with a discussion of how commodification functions as (...) a means for governing science. (shrink)

The proliferation of for-profit enterprises offering stem cell storage services for personal use illustrates one of the ways health is increasingly governed through uncertainty and speculative notions of risk. Without any firm guarantee of therapeutic utility, commercial stem cell banks offer to store a range of bodily tissues, signalling the further transformation of the living body into an accumulation strategy within biotechnology capitalism’s ‘tissue economies’. This article makes two related claims: first, it suggests that specifically gendered forms of identification with (...) the leading edge of the bioeconomy are embedded in the speculative practices of commercial stem cell banking and are particularly visible in the recent creation of a banking service for endometrial tissue marketed directly to women. Second, the article offers a novel analytic through which to explore the commercial banking of one’s own bodily tissues (or ‘autologous’ banking) through Marx’s discussion of money hoarding. The aim of the article is to thus further the conceptual claims linking emergent forms of economic and biomedical subjectivity to transformations in biotechnology capital. (shrink)