 | Jennifer Liu Associate Professor - University of Waterloo |
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02.08.2017-23.08.2017
Biotech Conundrums: Taiwanese Desires adn Emerging BioForms of Living
The specific objectives for this Visiting Researcher Residency application are to complete a book manuscript and journal article while drawing on the rich intellectual community at the Brocher Foundation. My expectation is that this environment will invigorate my thinking and will help me to frame the manuscript, or at least sections of it, in analytically enhanced ways. Thus, I plan to complete the book’s conclusion and all revisions by the end of the residency.
My collaboration on the article will be facilitated by proximity to the Graduate Institute and by Professor Bharadwaj’s expertise on the anthropology of stem cell research. He is a recognized expert in Anthropology and Science Studies for his work on stem cell research and therapeutics in India and, among many other publications, has authored “Enculturating Cells: The Anthropology, Substance, and Science of Stem Cells” for Annual Review of Anthropology (2012). At the 2014 Annual Meeting of the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), Professor Bharadwaj organized a session entitled, “Good Science, Bad Science: Panics and Ethics Surrounding Stem Cell Technologies Around the Globe” for which I delivered a talk, “Beyond Good and Bad: Stem Cell Research in Taiwan.” In the forthcoming paper, we seek to provide evidence and a framework for thinking of science outside of the good-bad dualism. Drawing on ethnographic work from India and Taiwan, we aim to show that questions of what science does, what it is asked to do, and how it is practiced, exceed dualistic framings. Grounded research shows, rather, that normative qualifications of science as good or bad often miss the nuanced and lived experiences and negotiations of doing (good) science.
Jennifer Liu received her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley and San Francisco in 2008. She is a cultural and medical anthropologist whose work intersects with science and technology studies (STS) and global health, and addresses emerging biomedical technologies, science and health governance and ethics, and transnational knowledge production. She has worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, Taiwan and Zambia. She teaches courses on sociocultural anthropology, theory, medical anthropology, global health, STS, and China among others.
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