In Fungible Life Aihwa Ong explores the dynamic world of cutting-edge bioscience research, offering critical insights into the complex ways Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences are entangled in a tropical environment brimming with the threat of emergent diseases. At biomedical centers in Singapore and China scientists map genetic variants, disease risks, and biomarkers, mobilizing ethnicized "Asian" bodies and health data for genomic research. Their differentiation between Chinese, Indian, and Malay DNA makes fungible Singapore's ethnic-stratified databases that come to "represent" majority populations in Asia. By deploying genomic science as a public good, researchers reconfigure the relationships between objects, peoples, and spaces, thus rendering "Asia" itself as a shifting entity. In Ong's analysis, Asia emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where the population's genetic pasts, anxieties and hopes, shared genetic weaknesses, and embattled genetic futures intersect. Furthermore, her illustration of the contrasting methods and goals of the Biopolis biomedical center in Singapore and BGI Genomics in China raises questions about the future direction of cosmopolitan science in Asia and beyond.

A theorization of how the bioeconomy and biotechnology remake 'life itself,' creating crises in ethics and governance.

Genome Finland tells a story of genomic medicine in Finland from the study of rare Finnish diseases in the 1960s and 1970s to the implementation of personalized medicine in the 2020s. The main focus is on the 21st century – the period after the Human Genome Project – and on the establishment of new infrastructures to support genomic medicine, such as biobanks. The book opens up the reasoning and discussions as well as the settings and events through which Finnish medical genetics reached the top level of international biomedicine in the late 1990s, biobanks and biobank research evolved during the 2000s and 2010s, and large transnational public-private partnership projects utilising massive amounts of genome and patient data started to dominate also Finnish research into the 2020s. In particular, Genome Finland examines and exposes the connections between biomedical science, ‘knowledge-based’ economy and business, and innovation policy in Finland during the past decades.

Radical international legal history of the expansionary project of statehood and its role in generating profound distributional inequalities

This book offers a genealogical interrogation of the relationship between security and risk through its materialisation in insurance.

In the 2000s, Laos was treated as a model country for the efficacy of privatized, "sustainable" hydropower projects as viable options for World Bank-led development. By viewing hydropower as a process that creates ecologically uncertain environments, Jerome Whitington reveals how new forms of managerial care have emerged in the context of a privatized dam project successfully targeted by transnational activists. Based on ethnographic work inside the hydropower company, as well as with Laotians affected by the dam, he investigates how managers, technicians and consultants grapple with unfamiliar environmental obligations through new infrastructural configurations, locally-inscribed ethical practices, and forms of flexible experimentation informed by American management theory. Far from the authoritative expertise that characterized classical modernist hydropower, sustainable development in Laos has been characterized by a shift from the risk politics of the 1990s to an ontological politics in which the institutional conditions of infrastructure investment are pervasively undermined by sophisticated ‘hactivism.’ Whitington demonstrates how late industrial environments are infused with uncertainty inherent in the anthropogenic ecologies themselves. Whereas ‘anthropogenic’ usually describes human-induced environmental change, it can also show how new capacities for being human are generated when people live in ecologies shot through with uncertainty. Implementing what Foucault called a "historical ontology of ourselves," Anthropogenic Rivers formulates a new materialist critique of the dirty ecologies of late industrialism by pinpointing the opportunistic, ambitious and speculative ontology of capitalist natures.

This one-of-a-kind literary and conceptual experiment does anthropology differently—in all the wrong ways. No field trips. No other cultures. This is a personal journey within anthropology itself, and a kind of love story. A critical, candid, hilarious take on the culture of academia and, ultimately, contemporary society. Stuck Moving follows a professor affected by bipolar disorder, drug addiction, and a stalled career who searches for meaning and purpose within a sanctimonious discipline and a society in shambles. It takes aim at the ableist conceit that anthropologists are outside observers studying a messy world. The lens of analysis is reversed to expose the backstage of academic work and life, and the unbecoming self behind scholarship. Blending cultural studies, psychoanalysis, comedy, screenwriting, music lyrics, and poetry, Stuck Moving abandons anthropology’s rigid genre conventions, suffocating solemnity, and enduring colonial model of extractive knowledge production. By satirizing the discipline’s function as a culture resource for global health and the neoliberal university, this book unsettles anthropology’s hopeful claims about its own role in social change.