Events

This talk is jointly organised with Tembusu College, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Assoc Prof Greg Clancey, Asia Research Institute, and Tembusu College, National University of Singapore.

ABSTRACT

Her talk introduces the main themes of her new book Fungible Life: Experiment in the Asian City of Life (Duke University Press, 2016) that is based on research at Biopolis, Singapore. Her study offers critical insights into the complex ways in which Asian bioscientific worlds and cosmopolitan sciences entangle in a tropics brimming with the threat of emerging diseases. At Biopolis, researchers have been busy accessing ‘Asian’ bodies and health data. Singapore’s ethnic-specified genetic  databases aim to ‘represent’ majority populations in Asia. In addition, genomic techniques and research both grow in response to an ecology of health risks and bio-insecurities. She illuminates the interplay of fortunes and uncertainties – in the development of medical big data, building an entrepreneurial biomedical hub, attracting science talents, and luring big pharma. In the process of deploying genomic science as a public good, ‘Asia’ emerges as a richly layered mode of entanglements, where shared genetic weakness and embattled genetic futures intersect. Finally, she compares Biopolis’s deployment of Asian ethnicized data as immutable data points to BGI Genomics China’s framing of a national genetic cosmos.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Aihwa Ong is the Robert H. Lowie Distinguished Chair in Anthropology and Chair of Asian Studies at U.C. Berkeley. Her work has long explored entanglements of technology, politics, and culture in the Asia Pacific Rim. Recent publications include the books Neoliberalism as Exception, and Buddha is Hiding, and the edited volumes Global Assemblages and Asian Biotech.

REGISTRATION

Admission is free. We would greatly appreciate if you click on the “Register” button above to RSVP.