The Pembroke Research Seminar
The Pembroke Research Seminar meets on Wednesdays, from 10:00 AM – 12:30 PM.
It brings together Pembroke Center Postdoctoral Fellows, Faculty Research Fellows, Graduate Fellows, other interested Brown faculty and selected students, affiliated Visiting Scholars, and distinguished guest lecturers. The research theme of the seminar changes annually.
Application Information
Deadline Information
Pembroke Center Seminar 2009-2010
"Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective"
Seminar Leader: Kay B. Warren
Chesler-Mallow Senior Faculty Research Fellow, Pembroke Center
Tillinghast ‘32 Professor of International Studies and
Professor of Anthropology
In 2009-10, the Pembroke Seminar will pursue a multi-disciplinary examination of "Markets and Bodies in Transnational Perspective.” This collective inquiry will raise questions about global flows of people and technology that involve reimagining the body and transforming what it means to be human. Our aim is to the trace patterns of global flows, and responses, international and local, to the tensions and uncertainties they unleash. We want to understand the changing ways bodies are commodified, and the individual experiences and ideological constructions of these processes. The seminar will explore sites of anxiety when innovations in global labor markets and biotechnologies appear to push ahead of the law. How are these sites moralized and politicized? How are international norms and regulatory strategies formulated to define rapidly moving currents of change? The project is challenging because its scope is larger than any one discipline. This inquiry calls for a variety of disciplinary perspectives and provocative case studies from different parts of the world.
It is important to recognize that these innovations are occurring in contexts of neoliberal regimes of governance. As a result, it is crucial to consider policies that have the effect of projecting personal responsibility, self-regulation, and choice onto individuals as rational actors, and in so doing to create routinized sites of monitoring and intervention. What is obscured in the focus on decontexualized individual bodies – the migrant, the trafficking victim, the consumer of one’s own genetic information? What is the effect of ignoring the wider structural issues integral to people’s lives, which are profoundly influenced by these same economic policy paradigms? When do local narratives reassert the primacy of the social and economic contexts of people’s lives and their wider communities? Do precedents exist for this de- and re-contextualization of bodies, and what are the possible linkages to contemporary forms of market moralities?
The seminar will therefore deal with markets as particular historicized innovations whose complex social and political fields mediate their development. To bring these questions into focus, we will examine two distinctive domains of markets and bodies:
•The simultaneous recruitment and deterrence of migrant labor across borders and regions.
•The simultaneous normalization and rejection of human bodies with the global circulation of public health and biotechnological regimes.
Although these topics may seem unrelated, in practice there are ways in which they raise parallel issues and speak to each other in mutually revealing ways about the limits of the commodification of human beings. A transnational focus on the marketing of migrant labor and the medicalization of bodies requires us to capture dynamic situations where mobility and transnational circulation are important. Both involve the policing of bodies – across regional borders and across notions of health and illness. Both involve the recruitment of bodies (for transnational labor or for medical intervention) and the simultaneous deterrence of bodies (as potential “burdens” on state or medical resources). And both generate sites of anxiety and hope where people’s wider emotions and their sense of right and wrong collectively explode into public view to be debated, consumed, and politicized as moral dilemmas and moments of tragic violence. How do states, NGOs, and other social and political formations intervene in populations with the intent of envisioning a body specifically for the market? What are the limitations of these forms of power? How do current struggles around policing bodies and creating markets differ from earlier struggles and forms of anxiety surrounding the management of bodies?
Currently, the movement of people across borders generates testimonial stories of commodification and the cynical exploitation of transnational inequalities by business networks involved in illicit and legal commerce. Impoverished women who seek well paying work in wealthy countries are often recruited by local agents and transferred to international traffickers to be brutalized in brothels or privatized domestic work far from home. International adoptions are haunted by the fear that babies have been bought and sold for profit by well connected elite criminal networks tied to the state that start with desperately poor women in the global south and end with middle class families in the global north who may know little of this commerce.
Biotechnology raises another set of concerns over commodification and genetic experimentation: the movement of body parts for transplantation and reproduction in flows that mimic those of global capital, the increasing ability to pre-screen fetuses for gender and disease to test acceptable admission into society and the human race, the capability to technologically prolong end-of-life amidst movements voicing the “right to die,” stem cell debates over the limits of what is human and what can be experimented with freely to fight disease, the public fascination with and the commercial potential of cloning, and fears of cross-species hybridity in experimental efforts to meet the shortage of transplantable human body parts. Popular culture, in the form of mass media, news, literature, film, and rumor, signals sites of anxiety by evoking the dangers in testing the limits of “natural” bodily function and reproduction.
Given the wide picture of commodification one can trace across these two domains, how do legal systems confront rapidly morphing market innovations? How does this analytical strategy reveal the potential and the limitations of human rights frameworks to critique and intervene in these markets? What structural and political issues cause states and NGOs to resist, appropriate, or ignore international normative frameworks?
Legal Norms and Migration. An important recent trend in the recruitment of mobile labor has been the creation of norms born of hybrid human rights and criminal justice frameworks generated by UN bodies. The strategy has been to criminalize the commodification of human beings recruited for distant markets. Human trafficking, child labor, debt bondage, slavery, and, increasingly, international adoption rings and the sale of human organs for transplantation fall under this umbrella. International norms have moved from criminalizing the victim of trafficking, which is still a common practice for visa overstayers and those with illegal documents, to prosecuting the criminal enterprises involved in providing human commodities for these markets. This diversified transnational market generally outruns the capacity of policing and judicial systems to intervene in or regulate these markets. What are the unintended consequences of the ways international norms are used by a variety of political interests to target certain populations as “vulnerable” and identify workers engaged in exploitative labor as “victims” rather than as people with their own complex histories and identities? How do these discourses inform the work of NGOs, the development industry, and the criminal justice system? Which activists mobilize around these issues to generate a sense of crisis and shape wider public awareness? Why have many of these campaigns involved highly moralized discourses? Why, in fact, are there so few prosecutions of traffickers?
Norms and Biotechnological Regimes. In dealing with the global circulation of new public health paradigms – such as the marketing of technologies for the genetic screening of wider publics -- scholars note the shift in focus from infectious to genetic diseases and the emergence of a language of expectations about “fitness” and“survival.” In this arena, it is apparent that clinical applications are developing at a much faster rate than international norms and legal reform. How does the medical field deal with the fact that technological innovation seems to be running far ahead of the international consensus about these issues? How do norms pose the double-bind of unequal access to the products of new research alongside quandaries about the allocation of expensive medical resources? Given the seminar’s transnational framing, we will be particularly attuned to the ways medical technology is appropriated in different parts of the world. How are local understandings of the body, health, and care changing with this newly developing biotechnology? How is social difference part of this story?
Our themes, however, need to be seen as more than convenient cases – as “good to think with” because they generate striking parallels for analysis as one attempts to make sense of global markets and the body. The question remains: How do we conceptualize the convergence and the interplay of migratory labor and biomedical regimes? How might this consideration relate to the challenge of global governance and norms-making when the market leads the law, and, increasingly, medical practice? There are profoundly interactive and convergent forms of inequality and marginalization that cross-cut migration and health intervention, particularly in the context of the erosion of state welfare across the globe. The ironic interdependence of recruitment and deterrence is most evident at borders where the economic system depends on undocumented labor which must settle for precarious hourly jobs without benefits. These very laborers are the focus of anti-immigrant movements that seek to exclude them, in many cases, not only from legal residency but also from public medical and educational services. The biomedical irony arises when huge expenditures are made for high tech pre-life and end-of-life issues in particular areas while other bodies are simultaneously ignored, marginalized, or deemed “unacceptable,” among them liminal labor migrants who in some ways are treated as not fully human or not part of the general public. In both cases “biology” or “the market” are made to appear as if they have their own internal logic and impetus. What might their juxtaposition reveal about their social and political natures?
This seminar will benefit greatly from scholars working in various parts of the world on contemporary migratory labor, health, and market issues, or in historical perspective on topics relating to the interplay of the body, labor, and technology. We welcome social scientists, humanists, and historians whose work troubles conventional definitions of these issues, especially concerning markets and the commodification of the body. It would be a special asset to attract legal scholars who in their own work pursue the interplay of the market and the law, or are participants in debates about the efficacy of norms and rights versus regulatory strategies and corporate self-governance. We also hope to attract scholars who in their research demonstrate the creative tensions between locally distinctive meaning-makingversus discourses that appear to be globally hegemonic.
Finally, the seminar stands to benefit from the recent turn in the social sciences and humanities to pursuing “ethnography” as a research strategy. Anthropology’s canonical way of knowing appears to have inspired other fields to develop their own hybrid notions of qualitative research. It would be fascinating to have practitioners of these disciplinary hybrids join our multi-sited enterprise which seeks not only to understand discursive constructions and their institutional connections but also to capture experiences of people, markets, and bodies in a variety of locales. These methodological and analytical issues will be fertile grounds for seminar discussion and debate.
We welcome applications from all scholars who do not hold a tenured position. This is a residential fellowship. Fellows participate weekly in the Pembroke Seminar, teach one undergraduate course, and pursue individual research. Brown University is an EEO/AA employer. The Center strongly encourages underrepresented minority scholars to apply. The term of appointment is September 1, 2009-May 31, 2010. The stipend is $50,000, plus a supplement for health and dental insurance, unless otherwise covered.
The deadline for receipt of applications is December 10, 2008. Selections will be announced in February.
| Download 2009/2010 application materials |
For additional information contact: Donna_Goodnow@brown.edu or phone 401-863-2643.
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