Human beings are described by many spiritual traditions as ‘blind’ or ‘asleep’ or ‘in a dream.’ These terms refers to the limited attenuated state of consciousness of most human beings caught up in patterns of conditioned thought, feeling and perception, which prevent the development of our latent, higher spiritual possibilities. In the words of Idries Shah: “Man, like a sleepwalker who suddenly ‘comes to’ on some lonely road has in general no correct idea as to his origins or his destiny.” In some religious traditions, such as Christianity and Islam, the myth of the ‘Fall from the Garden of Eden’ symbolizes the loss of the primordial state through the veiling of higher consciousness. Other traditions use similar metaphors to describe the spiritual condition of humanity:

The Human Condition.

http://www.managingforimpact.org/sites/default/files/case/stilgoe_owen_macnaghten_2013_developing_a_framework_for_responsible_innovation.pdf

Developing a framework for responsible innovation

/pdf/modern-social-imaginaries-3bxtlxvdjy.pdf

Modern Social Imaginaries

Preface (1999) Preface (1990) 1. Subjects of Sex/Gender/Desire I. 'Women' as the Subject of Feminism II. The Compulsory Order of Sex/Gender/Desire III. Gender: The Circular Ruins of Contemporary Debate IV. Theorizing the Binary, the Unitary and Beyond V. Identity, Sex and the Metaphysics of Substance VI. Language, Power and the Strategies of Displacement 2. Prohibition, Psychoanalysis, and the Production of the Heterosexual Matrix I. Structuralism's Critical Exchange II. Lacan, Riviere, and the Strategies of Masquerade III. Freud and the Melancholia of Gender IV. Gender Complexity and the Limits of Identification V. Reformulating Prohibition as Power 3. Subversive Bodily Acts I. The Body Politics of Julia Kristeva II. Foucault, Herculine, and the Politics of Sexual Discontinuity III. Monique Wittig - Bodily Disintegration and Fictive Sex IV. Bodily Inscriptions, Performative Subversions Conclusion - From Parody to Politics

Postmodern Subjects, Postmodern BodiesThinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Postmodernism in the Contemporary WestYearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural PoliticsGender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity

The politics of life itself Biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century

Public dialogue about science, technology and medicine is an established part of the activities of a range of charities, private corporations, governmental departments and scientific institutions. However, the extent to which these activities challenge or bridge the lay-expert divide is questionable. Expertise is contested, by the public and the community of scholars who study and/or facilitate public engagement. In this paper, we explore the dynamics of expertise and their implications for the lay-expert divide at a series of public events about the new genetics. We examine participants' claims to expertise and consider how this relates to their claims to credibility and legitimacy and the way in which these events unfolded. Using a combination of ethnographic and discursive analysis, we found that participants supplemented technical expertise with other expert and lay perspectives. We can also link participants' claims to expertise to their generally positive appraisal of genetic research and services. The colonization of lay positions by expert speakers and the hybrid positioning of lay-experts was characteristic of the consensus and conservatism that emerged. This leads us to conclude that public engagement activities will not challenge the dominance of technical expertise in decision-making about science, technology and medicine without more explicit and reflexive problematization of the dynamics of expertise therein.

https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/~dasulliv/science_advisers/literature_review/kerr_burley_tutton_experts_lay_dialogue.pdf

Shifting Subject Positions Experts and Lay People in Public Dialogue

1. Introduction: Public Participation in Genetic Databases 2. Persons, Property and Gift: Exploring Languages of Tissue Donation to Biomedical Research 3. Blood Donation for Genetic Research: What Can we Learn From Donor's Narratives? 4. Levels and Styles of Participation in Genetic Databases: A Case Study of the North Cumbria Community Genetics Project 5. Informed Consent: The Contradictory Ethical Safeguards in Pharmacogenetics 6. Ambiguous Gifts: Public Anxiety, Informed Consent and Biobanks 7. Abandoning Informed Consent - The Case of Genetic Research in Population Collections 8. Children's Participation in Genetic Epidemiology: Consent and Control 9. 'Public Consent' or 'Scientific Citizenship'? What Counts as Public Participation in Population Based DNA Collections? 10. Tissue Collection and the Pharmaceutical Industry: Investigating Corporate Biobanks

Genetic Databases : Socio-Ethical Issues in the Collection and Use of DNA

Personalizing medicine: futures present and past.

As the search for human genetic variation has become a priority for biomedical science, debates have resurfaced about the use of race and ethnicity as scientific classifications. In this paper we consider the relationship between race, ethnicity and genetics, using insights from science and technology studies (STS) about processes of classification and standardization. We examine how leading biomedical science journals attempted to standardize the classifications of race and ethnicity, and analyse how a sample of UK genetic scientists used the concepts in their research. Our content analysis of 11 editorials and related guidelines reveals variations in the guidance on offer, and it appears that there has been a shift from defining the concepts to prescribing methodological processes for classification. In qualitative interviews with 17 scientists, the majority reported that they had adopted socio-political classification schemes from state bureaucracy (for example, the UK Census) for practical reasons, although some scientists used alternative classifications that they justified on apparently methodological grounds. The different responses evident in the editorials and interviews can be understood as reflecting the balance of flexibility and stability that motivate standardization processes. We argue that, although a genetic concept of race and ethnicity is unlikely to wholly supplant a socio-political one, the adoption of census classifications into biomedical research is an alignment of state bureaucracy and science that could have significant consequences.

The Standardization of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Science Editorials and UK Biobanks

This article critically engages with the influential theory of "molecularized biopower'' and "politics of life'' developed by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. Molecularization is assumed to signal the end of population-centred biopolitics and the disciplining of subjects as described by Foucault, and the rise of newforms of biosociality and biological citizenship. Drawing on empirical work in Science and Technology Studies (STS), we argue that this account is limited by a focus on novelty and assumptions about the transformative power of the genetic life sciences. We suggest that biopower consists of a more complex cluster of relationships between the molecular and the population. The biological existence of different human beings is politicized through different complementary and competing discourses around medical therapies, choices at the beginning and end of life, public health, environment, migration and border controls, implying a multiple rather than a singular politics of life.

Richard Tutton

Papers

Shifting Subject Positions Experts and Lay People in Public Dialogue

Genetic Databases : Socio-Ethical Issues in the Collection and Use of DNA

Personalizing medicine: futures present and past.

The Standardization of Race and Ethnicity in Biomedical Science Editorials and UK Biobanks

Life, science, and biopower