Biopolitical Excess: Techno-Legal Assemblage of Stem Cell Research in India

2017 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-123 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amit Prasad

Stem cell research on cardiac patients at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), which was disclosed through the media in 2005, created a storm. On the one hand, it was celebrated as a ‘global first in pioneering stem cell medicine’. On the other hand, not only the AIIMS study, but, more broadly, stem cell research and therapy in India was criticised for ‘tall claims [and] questionable ethics’. The responses of the policymakers and regulators in India were equally divergent. How are we to understand the contingency and unpredictability of the regulatory regime in India? The answers to this and other related questions are often presented through a regulatory fix—countries such as India need to tighten their regulatory regime. The need for a legally binding regulatory regime is undeniable; nevertheless, a narrow focus on a regulatory fix fails to explain several issues. In this article, I analyse the stem cell research on cardiac patients at AIIMS. Through a focus on epistemic, ethical and juridical assemblage of stem cell research, I highlight the inescapable contingency in the translation between ‘governmental rationality’ and ‘the practice of government’ and show how this reflects biopolitical excess.

2007 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. E231-E234 ◽  
Author(s):  
Balram Airan ◽  
Sachin Talwar ◽  
Shiv Choudhary ◽  
Akshay Bisoi ◽  
Ujjwal Chowdhury ◽  
...  

Politik ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Jacobsen ◽  
Jeppe Strandsbjerg

By signing the Ilulissat Declaration of May 2008, the five littoral states of the Arctic Ocean pre-emptively desecuritized potential geopolitical controversies in the Arctic Ocean by confirming that international law and geo-science are the defining factors underlying the future delimitation. This happened in response to a rising securitization discourse fueled by commentators and the media in the wake of the 2007 Russian flag planting on the geographical North Pole seabed, which also triggered harder interstate rhetoric and dramatic headlines. This case, however, challenges some established conventions within securitization theory. It was state elites that initiated desecuritization and they did so by shifting issues in danger of being securitized from security to other techniques of government. Contrary to the democratic ethos of the theory, these shifts do not necessarily represent more democratic procedures. Instead, each of these techniques are populated by their own experts and technocrats operating according to logics of right (law) and accuracy (science). While shifting techniques of government might diminish the danger of securitized relations between states, the shift generates a displacement of controversy. Within international law we have seen controversy over its ontological foundations and within science we have seen controversy over standards of science. Each of these are amplified and take a particularly political significance when an issue is securitized via relocation to another technique. While the Ilulissat Declaration has been successful in minimizing the horizontal conflict potential between states it has simultaneously given way for vertical disputes between the signatory states on the one hand and the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic on the other.


Author(s):  
Jerry Eades

This chapter examines the relationship between the Internet and sex tourism. It argues that interest in sex tourism in the media erupted in the early 1990s, about the same time that the Internet itself was becoming popular. The relationship between the two was both positive and negative. On the one hand, the Internet has allowed members of sexual subcultures to contact each other and for new forms of sex tourism to be marketed. On the other hand, the Internet also provided a platform for those opposed to sex tourism to raise the profile of the issue, in the process conflating images of sex tourism with those of Internet pornography, pedophilia, and child abuse, particularly in relation to tourism destinations in the Southeast Asian region. It has therefore aided the amplification of moral panics surrounding these issues. This sensational coverage has, however, tended to overshadow other forms of sex tourism, including those in which consenting adults meet together in resorts of clubs for recreational sex with each other. Thus, while the Internet has created moral panics and led to crackdowns in certain sections of the sex tourism market, it has allowed other alternative lifestyles to flourish on an unprecedented scale in an increasingly liberalized environment.


2007 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Negar Tayyar

AbstractThe increasing development in biomedical advances and medical technologies makes awarefor the importance of bioethics. Progresses in the fields of stem cell research, genetic technologies, organ transplantation and cloning aroused the bioethical debate. On one hand, the focus of bioethical issues mostly neglects the Muslim view, on the other hand there is a lack of differentiation within the Islamic positions.


Author(s):  
Matthew Gibson

This chapter outlines how the different representations for social work practice provide conflicting sets of standards, ideals and goals for social work organisations. Some ‘institutional logics’ are imposed on social work services by politicians and through the media, which set the boundaries for public praise and shame for an organisation, thereby directing and shaping its identity. Within this context, this chapter introduces the idea of organisational emotional safety, in which organisations are constructed to avoid organisational shaming and rejection, on the one hand, and attract pride and acceptance, on the other. In an attempt to manage its image and reputation, organisational leaders engage in this form of emotion work to create and maintain a consistent set of organisational actions which ensures that it is safe from episodic shaming, while evoking pride within the organisation and acceptance without. A case example is provided to illustrate this argument that pride and shame are strategically used to create ‘appropriate’ organisations as defined by those with the power of definition.


Author(s):  
Andrea Botto Stuven

The Documentation Center of the Contemporary History of Chile (CIDOC), which belongs to the Universidad Finis Terrae (Santiago), has a digital archive that contains the posters and newspapers inserts of the anti-communist campaign against Salvador Allende’s presidential candidacy in 1964. These appeared in the main right-wing newspapers of Santiago, between January and September of 1964. Although the collection of posters in CIDOC is not complete, it is a resource of great value for those who want to research this historical juncture, considering that those elections were by far the most contested and conflicting in the history of Chile during the 20th Century, as it implicted the confrontation between two candidates defending two different conceptions about society, politics, and economics. On the one hand, Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Chilean left; on the other, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democracy, coupled with the traditional parties of the Right. While the technical elements of the programs of both candidates did not differ much from each other, the political campaign became the scenario for an authentic war between the “media” that stood up for one or the other candidate. Frei’s anticommunist campaign had the financial aid of the United States, and these funds were used to gather all possible resources to create a real “terror” in the population at the perspective of the Left coming to power. The Chilean Left labeled this strategy of using fear as the “Terror Campaign.”


2015 ◽  
Vol 156 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-59 ◽  
Author(s):  
Albert Moran

Handbooks about the business practice of franchising do not seem to consider whether the practice occurs in television and other media industries. This lack of regard is replicated by media and communication scholars who fail to consider how this kind of media licensing works, even though the term franchising' is frequently adopted. To place the topic in a wider realm of critical inquiry, this article analyses a set of distinct economic, legal and cultural parameters that have to do with media intertext franchising on the one hand and television format franchising on the other. It finds that the two sets of practices operate under different regimes of legal protection, one concentrating on trade mark law and the other focusing on copyright law. In turn, this raises a question concerning the legal protectability of television program formats such as Ugly Betty under a legal shield associated with the media intertext rather than the television format. The presence of dramatic character would seem to be crucial to facilitating the building of a brand associated with a fictional character's aura or image.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 367-384 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Birkner ◽  
Daniel Nölleke

Using the concept of mediatization, in this article, we analyze the relationship between sport and media from a sport-centered perspective. Examining the autobiographies of 14 German and English soccer players, we investigate how athletes use media outlets, what they perceive as the media’s influence and its logic, and—crucially—how this usage and these perceptions affect their own media-related behavior. Our findings demonstrate the important role of the media for the sports systems from the athlete’s point of view and demonstrate the research potential of mediatization as a fruitful concept in studies on sport communication. On the one hand, the sport stars reflect in their autobiographies that their status and income depend on media coverage; and on the other hand, they complain about the omnipresence of the media, especially offside the pitch and feel unfairly treated by the tabloid press, both in England and in Germany.


1990 ◽  
Vol 11 ◽  
pp. 84-99 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gunther Kress

The label Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used by a significant number of scholars with a diverse set of concerns in a number of disciplines. It is well-exemplified by the editorial statement of the journal Discourse and Society, which defines its envisaged domain of enquiry as follows: “the reproduction of sexism and racism through discourse; the legitimation of power; the manufacture of consent; the role of politics, education and the media; the discursive reproduction of dominance relation between groups; the imbalances in international communication and information.” While some practitioners of Critical Discourse Analysis might want to amend this list here or there, the set of concerns sketched here well describes the field of CDA. The only comment I would make, a comment crucial for many practitioners of CDA, is to insist that these phenomena are to be found in the most unremarkable and everyday of texts—and not only in texts which declare their special status in some way. This scope, and the overtly political agenda, serves to set CDA off on the one hand from other kinds of discourse analysis, and from textlinguistics (as well as from pragmatics and sociolinguistics) on the other.


2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 337-355
Author(s):  
Annik Dubied Losa ◽  
Claudine Burton-Jeangros

AbstractNowadays, relationships between nonhuman animals and humans are debated, often in relation to issues associated with the risks they represent for each other. On the one hand, new diseases and accidents indicate that animals are not as innocuous as they were long thought; on the other hand, the now questioned human impact on the natural environment is considered a risk for animals. This research analyzed these contrasting images of animals in the Swiss information media. Of the five main animal figures identified over the last 30 years, this paper focuses on the Undesirable Animal and the Victim Animal. These two figures have existed throughout the observed period; in contrast to Victim Animals, however, who appear fairly infrequently, Undesirable Animals have become more and more common in the last decade, usually in relation to a specific issue (such as the avian flu). This suggests that the media more often convey the dominant anthropocentric relationship to animals, reflecting a preoccupation with the protection of humans against dangerous animals, whereas the protection of animals from humans is considered less important. Recent controversies demonstrate, however, that the frontier between “us” and “them” is regularly renegotiated.


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