Aimee Bahng & Bishnupriya Ghosh: "Elemental Media and Extractive Politics"


 Center for Culture and Capital     May 4 2018 | 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM HG 1010

"Elemental Media and Extractive Politics"

Aimee Bahng (Pomona, Gender and Women's Studies) &
Bishnupriya Ghosh (UCSB, English)

Fri, May 4, 3-5PM in HG1010

Join us for two amazing talks, followed by a dialogue between Profs. Bahng and Ghosh.

Aimee Bahng: “Toward a Transpacific Undercommons: Decolonizing Ecosystems Theory and the Biopolitical Management of the Ocean”
Examining accounts of radiation sickness and atomic testing in and around the Marshall Islands, Prof. Bahng examines how islanders are relegated to bare life, and an irradiated Pacific is transformed into a biopolitical zone of finacialized genetic research. A “transpacific undercommons” pursues alternative formulations of interspecies connection that emerge from feminist, decolonial thought, and queer-of-color critique. At a moment when development banks and multinational corporations continue to look to the Pacific for its fungibility and exploitation, this talk imagines alternative forms of undersea networks.

Bishnupriya Ghosh: “The Blood Files: From Specimen to Data in the Biomedical Maze”
Prof. Ghosh’s talk concerns the extraction and valuation of blood under epidemic conditions with reference to the HIV/AIDS epidemics. Looking at two research sites—a retrovirus laboratory in Seattle and a clinic in Mumbai—Prof. Ghosh makes legible a “politics of extraction” by following “blood files,” or the storage technologies that classify “wet” specimen and “dry” data. Managed HIV turns out to be less the boon that big pharma brings to patients as beneficiaries and more the achievement of distributed labor between scientist and doctor, technician and nurse, health counselor and patient, friends and lovers.

Sponsored by the UCI Center for Culture & Capital, the UCI Medical Humanities Initiative, and the departments of English, Gender & Sexuality Studies, Asian American Studies, and Anthropology.