AAA 2012 Call for Papers: "Stopped at the Border: Immobility in Science, Technology, and Medicine"

AAA 2012 Call for Papers

Science, Technology and Medicine Interest Group Society for Medical Anthropology Panel Organizers: Betsey Brada, Tazin Karim, Peter Locke, Aaron Seaman

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*Stopped at the Border: Immobility in Science, Technology and Medicine*

As global flows of scientific knowledge and commodities increase, boundaries across these trajectories become sites of negotiation over power, security and access. These lines reflect and reconstruct larger cultural configurations of legality, legitimacy and legibility as certain objects, populations, and fields of knowledge are mobile and others are not. Examples of how borders are transgressed or become permeable have long been of great interest in anthropology and in science studies. Yet, for many people, goods, and knowledges, borders are not porous: they are concrete instantiations of immobility—points of stoppage rather than passage. Meanwhile other professionals, forms of expertise, and institutions of governance continue to work to sustain existing boundaries and find new ways to control transgressive forms of circulation in ways that challenge our explanatory frameworks.

This panel seeks to turn a lens on borders themselves and the ways in which they work to regulate and inhibit the mobility of certain technologies, ideas, and categories of person. What social and institutional dynamics are at play when transgression or free circulation is not the outcome? What are the consequences and the lived realities for those unable to cross? What other possibilities for movement exist? How does the horizon of a given boundary instantiate and regulate divisions between what is mobile and what is confined in time and space?

We aim to engage these and related questions by assembling ethnographic and theoretical inquiries into contemporary forms of border crossing in science, medicine, and research. Topics might include legal-regulatory, political, and clinical challenges posed by the literal border-crossings of medical objects, bodies, and technologies (e.g., pharmaceuticals, organs and tissue samples, experimental diagnostics and treatments, the use of medical/psychiatric evaluations in asylum claims), especially when those crossings are banned or subject to control.

Please submit 250-word abstracts to Peter Locke at plocke@princeton.edu no later than March 1, 2012.

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Betsey Behr Brada, Ph.D.

Postdoctoral Research Associate | Center for Health and Wellbeing | Princeton University Chair, Science, Technology&  Medicine (STM) Interest Group

354 Wallace Hall | Princeton, NJ 08544

P: 609 258 7387 | E: bbrada@princeton.edu