Biopolitics of Science Research Network
Bringing researchers together to promote dialogue and collaboration around the social study of science, medicine, and technology.
The Biopolitics of Science Research Network is a hub for scholars pushing the boundaries of science and technology studies (STS). We bring together researchers to critically engage with the shifting landscapes of technoscience, power, and society.
From emerging biotechnologies, AI governance, and planetary health to decolonial technoscience and environmental justice, our network fosters interdisciplinary dialogue on the most pressing issues of our time. We explore biopolitics, data ethics, climate infrastructures, and emergent techno-social worlds, amplifying perspectives that challenge dominant narratives and reimagine possible futures.
We run an extensive series of activities, including:
Wednesday 28 May
1:30 - 3 pm
RD Watt Seminar Room 203
Register to attend
The fractious and disorganised governmental response to the coronavirus pandemic in the United States prompted many observers to ask why the country ‒ which had the knowledge, resources, and plans to deal with such an event ‒ was caught so unprepared when the crisis struck. In fact, this talk will argue, US officials had been planning for a pandemic for more than two decades, and many of these plans were implemented in the early stages of the pandemic. As authorities responded to the crisis, they relied on an already formulated set of concepts and tools that had been devised for managing a future emergency. These preexisting tools enabled officials to make sense of the event and to rapidly implement policies in response, but they also led to significant blind spots. What did these planning tools allow officials to see, and what did they hide from view? And, as we assess the failures in our response to the pandemic and attempt to prepare for “the next one,” to what extent should we take for granted the capacity of these tools to guide future interventions effectively?
Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. His research interests include biopolitics, risk society, the social studies of medicine, and the anthropology of knowledge. His most recent books are Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (California, 2017), The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (with Stephen J. Collier) (Princeton, 2021), and Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge (Polity, 2024).
The introduction of Andrew Lakoff’s book is available upon request, contact Rachel Yang: r.yang@sydney.edu.au
Thursday 29 May
2 - 4 pm
Seminar Room 441, A02 Social Sciences Building
Registration: Open to all HDR students (MA/PhD) and Early Career Researchers working in the social sciences, humanities, public health, and law. To apply email Rachel Yang r.yang@sydney.edu.au with your name, affiliation, discipline, research interests and a brief statement of interest before May 12, 2025.
How is the future brought into the present and made an object of knowledge and intervention? In areas ranging from public health to environmental management to national security, experts are charged with anticipating and managing potential threats. They draw on techniques such as benefit-risk assessment, model-building, scenario-planning and computer-based simulations. These techniques and practices of future-making lead to a number of questions for social analysts: What role does the past play in shaping the imagined future? How do authorities attain credibility for particular visions of the future? To what extent are experts held responsible if the anticipated future does not arrive?
In this master class, we will examine different conceptual and theoretical approaches to understanding the production of possible futures. We will take up examples of anticipatory techniques from various fields—in areas such as climate modelling, pandemic preparedness, and national security planning—to develop methods of critical analysis. And we will think about the history of different ways of conceiving and acting upon the future, as well as the social and political implications of such anticipatory knowledge practices.
Andrew Lakoff is Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Southern California, where he also directs the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life. His research interests include biopolitics, risk society, the social studies of medicine, and the anthropology of knowledge. His most recent books are Unprepared: Global Health in a Time of Emergency (California, 2017), The Government of Emergency: Vital Systems, Expertise, and the Politics of Security (with Stephen J. Collier) (Princeton, 2021), and Planning for the Wrong Pandemic: Covid-19 and the Limits of Expert Knowledge (Polity, 2024).
Workshop - Pursuits of Population: Feminist and Decolonial Approaches to “Population Thinking”
March 7, 2025
Precis
“Population thinking” is inherent to many methodologies in scientific and technological practice. Its contemporary purchase ranges from uses in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence, or mathematical modeling (in realms from economic forecasting to disease modeling and climate futures) to impacts on policies in public health, reproduction, immigration, labor, and the environment. Populations, then, form a critical parameter to advancing technoscience and society today, and a normative optic through which collective futures are imagined.
Yet, as recent key feminist interventions have emphasized, “population” is a deeply vexed conceptual apparatus. As a mode of envisaging life en masse, this framework—or boundary object—is entangled with eugenic histories of colonial technoscience and “economized” approaches to development (Murphy 2017), and in some contemporary iterations, can reinforce deep hierarchies of race, class, gender, and geography (Clarke & Haraway 2018).
In the wake of these critiques, this workshop brings critical humanities and social science thinking to bear on the various pursuits of “populations,” “population thinking,” and “populationism” in different technoscientific sites. While population thinking is debated in the disparate realms of critical data studies, reproductive studies, new kinship studies, political economy, human geography, and environmental humanities, this workshop aims to bring these scholarly interventions together to explore how to think “populations” in ways that extend disciplinary or thematic domains.
We are particularly oriented around a feminist science studies approach, in conversation with queer, postcolonial, critical race, and Indigenous STS. Scholarship in feminist STS has considered population thinking in the disparate sites of the life and reproductive sciences, digital and data cultures, and Anthropocene ecologies; in this workshop, we aim to draw these scholarly conversations together to explore what new feminist toolkits we might generate.
Ultimately, this workshop aims to gather new understandings and novel questions to inform future and speculative pursuits of population across social theory and technoscience. We will ask after both the contemporary enactments and limitations of population thinking, and alternative concepts that may better enable us to envisage just collective futures.
View our program (pdf, 241KB).
Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs
Monday, March 18, 2024
Why are women freezing their eggs in record numbers? Motherhood on Ice explores this question by drawing on the stories of more than 150 women who pursued fertility preservation technology.
Moving between narratives of pain and empowerment, these nuanced personal stories reveal the complexity of women’s lives as they struggle to preserve and extend their fertility. Contrary to popular belief, egg freezing is rarely about women postponing fertility for the sake of their careers.
Rather, the most-educated women are increasingly forced to delay childbearing because they face a mating gap—a lack of eligible, educated, equal partners ready for marriage and parenthood. For these women, egg freezing is a reproductive backstop, a technological attempt to bridge the gap while waiting for the right partner.
But it is not an easy choice for most. Their stories reveal the extent to which it is logistically complicated, physically taxing, financially demanding, emotionally draining, and uncertain in its effects.
Speaker
Marcia Inhorn is the William K. Lanman Jr. Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at Yale University. As a medical anthropologist, Inhorn’s research interests revolve around gender and health, science and technology studies (STS), feminist theory (including masculinity studies), religion and bioethics, globalization and global health, cultures of biomedicine and ethnomedicine, stigma and human suffering, and the health costs of conflict, especially for refugees and forced migrants.
View our program (pdf, 208KB).
Research Seminar with Professor Sheila Jasanoff: 3 Aug 2023 - Between Extinction and the Singularity: A Co-Productionist Take on AI Ethics
Speaker: Sheila Jasanoff, Harvard University
STS has set itself up to be the critical field that puts the social production of science and technology under its lens, much as sociology studies society, anthropology studies culture, or political science studies politics. Yet, when “studying up,” with two of humankind’s most powerful instruments in its sights, STS runs the risk of capture, of fetishizing and celebrating the very analytic objects it seeks to critique.
Book Launch - The Viral Politics of Covid-19
This book criticall examines the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal and biological governance using a multidisciplinary approach. The perspectives reflected in this volume investigate the imbrications between technosphere and biosphere at social, economic, and political levels.
The biological dimensions of our eveolving understanding of "home" are analysed as the common thread linking the problem of zoonotic diseases and planetary health with that of geopolitics, biosecurity, bioeconomics and biophilosphies of the plant-animal-human interface.
In doing so, the contributions collectively highlight the complexities, challenges, and opportunities for humanity, opening new perspectives on how to inhabit our shared planet.
LABTALK is an interdisciplinary reading group of scholars, activists, scientists, and creatives, dedicated to critical engagements with technoscientific knowledge. During our two-hour long sessions, we will examine a range of key texts in STS scholarship – tracing out notable developments in expertise, classification, scientific methods, and institutional norms.
25 March - Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships by Brian Earp & Julian Savulescu. 2020
30 April - Thinking with Soils: Material Politics and Social Theory by Juan Salazar et al. 2020
27 May - The War Against Animals by Dinesh Wadiwel. 2015*
25 June - An Ecology of Knowledges: Fear, Love, and Technoscience in Guatemalan Forest Conservation by Micha Rahder. 2020
26 August - Bio politics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence by Joseph Pugliese. 2020
24 September - Aerial Aftermaths: Wartime from Above by Caren Kaplan. 2018
28 October - Pollution is Colonialism by Max Liboiron. 2021 *
26 November - Radiation Brain Moms and Citizen Scientists: The Gender Politics of Food Contamination after Fukushima by Aya Kimura. 2017
In times of shutdowns, cancelled events, and new routines of social distancing—we are much more in need of intimate intellectual exchange.
The BoS Labtalk reading group is therefore going online!
This year’s theme is called “Bodies and Entanglements” and you can find the schedule and more information here.
Wednesday 19 February 2020
Special event: The value(s) of precision medicine
Masterclass with Professor Barbara Prainsack
Exploring how precision medicine, with its programmatic focus on individual patients, could– perhaps counterintuitively – shed light on the substantive meaning of value in healthcare. For more information, contact: Associate Professor Sonja van Wichelen
2019 Lab Talk Reading Group
When: Mondays from 4-6pm
Venue: Meeting Room 370, Social Sciences Building (A02)
Visit the official website of Lab Talk for more information.
Friday 1 November 2019
Workshop: Humanity, identity and biopolitics in post-globalisation
We witness in the 21st century a backlash against global cosmopolitanism, cynicism about the efficacy of human rights, and a heightened interest in the project of national identities. How to understand these developments in a global and comparative perspective? What kind of conceptual tools are needed to understand the complexities and stakes involved? This symposium explores post-colonial biopolitics in an era of post-globalisation and new nationalisms.
13 June 2019
Book Seminar: The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs
Professor Catherine Waldby, Director of the Research School of Social Sciences, at the Australian National University will be presenting from her new book The Oocyte Economy: The Changing Meaning of Human Eggs which was just published with Duke University Press. In recent years increasing numbers of women from wealthy countries have turned to egg donation, egg freezing, and in vitro fertilization to become pregnant, especially later in life. This trend has created new ways of using, exchanging, and understanding oocytes—the reproductive cells specific to women. In The Oocyte Economy Catherine Waldby draws on 130 interviews — with scientists, clinicians, and women who have either donated or frozen their oocytes or received those of another woman —to trace how the history of human oocytes’ perceived value intersects with the biological and social life of women.
16 April 2019
Synthesizing Hope: A Special Lecture by Professor Anne Pollock
Anne Pollock, Professor of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s College, London, will be presenting her latest book Synthesizing Hope: Matter, Knowledge, and Place in South African Drug Discovery.
By analyseing iThemba Pharmaceuticals, a startup company in South African, from material and social perspectives, Professor Pollock explores how the location of scientific knowledge production matters in different ways, and challenges the limitations of the current global health frameworks.
23 November 2018
Masterclass: The microbiome revolution?
Microbiome research, the study of microbial communities in host organisms, is claimed to be ‘revolutionary’ science. But how true is this? In this masterclass, leading scholars in the field will review the research in human microbiome and examine its influences in human health, professional and social media.
27 August 2018 to 13 September 2018
Biolegality Pop-Up Research Lab
The Biopolitics of Science Research Network has been awarded funding for a Pop-Up Research Lab by Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC). Explore the emerging issues in biolegality through a series of workshops, seminars, masterclasses and roundtables:
For a detailed list of upcoming events, please visit the University's What's On Calendar.
Professor Sonja Van Wichelen
Email: sonja.vanwichelen@sydney.edu.au
