Dr Charis Thompson, University of California, Berkeley, USA

Chair, Prof Clare Williams, CBAS

In this talk I attempt to bring together work on three interrelated phenomena: medical tourism, with its emphasis on the movement of empowered,biosocial citizens seeking medical care by travelling down scientific, regulatory and / or economic gradients, and on the development by entrepreneurs and governments of medical infrastructure as a form of vacation destination that earns foreign exchange and creates a new sector of the labor market; medical migrations, which focuses on movements within and across national boundaries, where medical needs are essentialized or averted in ways relating to immigration or migrant status and the freedom from various kinds of persecution; and medical trafficking, which emphasizes those living in the global south and those living low income lives in the global north who are increasingly forced to or opt to become sources of biological resource for the wealthy. I ask whether it is possible to combine the insights of all three, and suggest ways of doing so. I then compare this kind of inquiry, which I argue is necessary to understand contemporary developments in biomedicine and biotechnology, to the long-standing ideology of science as value-neutral and the same in all places at all times, whose pursuit is no less than, in Max Weber’s words, a “vocation,” and argue that once science is a vacation, rather than a vocation, a clean separation of the calling of the scientist and the implication of the demos is no longer possible.

Biography: Dr Charis Thompson is Associate Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She is Director of the Berkeley Science, Technology, and Society Center, and of the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality. She is also the Director of the Project on Stem Cells and Society at Berkeley’s Stem Cell Center. Thompson is the author of Making Parents: The Ontological Choreography of Reproductive Technologies (MIT Press 2005), which won the 2007 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Study of Science, and of numerous articles on reproductive and stem cell technologies.