Date: Wed, 24 Sep 1997 11:01:45 -0500 From: "peter j. taylor" <[log in to unmask]> An offshoot of the 1993 Brandeis ISHPSSB meetings: Peter J. Taylor, Saul E. Halfon, Paul N. Edwards, editors Changing Life: Genomes, Ecologies, Bodies, Commodities University of Minnesota Press (1-800-621-2736) A fascinating look at how the culture of today's life sciences affects our culture. In laboratories all over the world, life-even the idea of life-is changing. And with these changes, whether they result in square tomatoes or cyborgs, come transformations in our social order-sometimes welcome, sometimes troubling, depending on where we stand. Changing Life offers a close look at how the mutable forms and concepts of life link the processes of science to those of information, finance, and commodities. The contributors, drawn from disciplines within science and technology studies and from geography, ecology, and developmental biology, provide a range of interpretive angles on the metaphors, narratives, models, and practices of the life sciences. Their essays-about planetary management and genome sequencing, ecologies and cyborgs-address actual and imagined transformations at the center and at the margins of transnational relations, during the post-Cold War era and in times to come. They consider such topics as the declining regulatory state, ascendant transnational networks, and capital's legal reign over intellectual property, life-form patents, and marketable pollution licenses. Changing Life argues that we cannot understand the power of the life sciences in modern society without exploring the intersections of science and technology with other cultural realms. To that end, this book represents a collective attempt to join the insights of science and technology studies and cultural studies. As a work of cultural politics, it makes a contribution to changing life in a context of changing social order. Contributors: Simon Cole, Cornell U; Scott Gilbert, Swarthmore College; Herbert Gottweis, U of Salzburg; Yrj=F6 Haila, U of Tampere, Finland; Rosaleen Love, Victoria U of Technology, Melbourne, Australia; and Richard A. Schroeder, Rutgers. Peter J. Taylor is Eugene Lang Professor of Social Change at Swarthmore College. Saul E. Halfon is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Science and Technology Studies at Cornell University. Paul N. Edwards is acting assistant professor in the Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. 240 pages Cultural Politics Series, Volume 13 $19.95 Paper ISBN 0-8166-3013-5 $49.95 Cloth ISBN 0-8166-3012-7 September 1997 telephone for orders: 1-800-621-2736 Contents Paul Edwards, Peter Taylor & Saul Halfon=09Introduction: Changing Life in the New World Dis/Order Paul Edwards=09The terminator meets commander data: Cyborg identity in the new world order Scott Gilbert=09Bodies of knowledge: Biology and the intercultural universi= ty Herbert Gottweis=09Genetic engineering, discourses of deficiency, and the new politics of population Rick Schroeder=09Contradictions along the commodity road to environmental stabilization: Foresting Gambian gardens Yrji Haila=09Discipline or solidarity? Ecology as politics Saul Halfon=09Over-populating the world: Notes towards a discursive reading Peter Taylor=09How do we know we have global environmental problems? Undifferentiated science-politics and its potential reconstruction Simon Cole=09Do androids pulverize tiger bones to use as aphrodisiacs? Rosaleen Love=09Bubbles in the cosmic saucepan Peter Taylor=09Afterword: Shifting positions for knowing and intervening in the cultural politics of the life sciences The cover blurb by Steve Fuller reads "Changing Life is the strongest collective bid to date to make science and technology studies a politically relevant academic practice. The unmistakeable vision of Donna Haraway, very much in evidence in these pages, serves notice to those who still doubt that science, politics, and science and technology studies can be mutually enhancing activities. General readers will be especially provoked by Scott Gilbert's reasoned defense of biolgy as not merely the new queen of the sciences but the very centerpiece of liberal education in the 21st century." Peter Taylor Lang Visiting Professor for Social Change Biology Department, Swarthmore College Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA phone: 610-690-6858 (o); 328-8663 (fax) email: [log in to unmask] http://xprocesses.swarthmore.edu