1 / 24

Researching Childhood Growth and Change

Researching Childhood Growth and Change. Bio-politics, affect, attractors. What am I up to?. There have been good reasons to build defenses against the relevance of ‘life processes’ for childhood studies and social science more broadly

johana
Download Presentation

Researching Childhood Growth and Change

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript


  1. Researching Childhood Growth and Change Bio-politics, affect, attractors

  2. What am I up to? • There have been good reasons to build defenses against the relevance of ‘life processes’ for childhood studies and social science more broadly • Today there are good intellectual and strategic reasons to drop those defences • News ways to grow and articulate critical insights are needed.

  3. What is bio-politics? • Contestation at the overlap of life processes and social processes • Aristotle - two words for life - zoë / bios • Foucault – state/population relationship • Very newsy • Craig Venter ‘artificial life’ • Food, water, power, climate, resource scarcity

  4. The Overlap • Relations between life processes and social processes are not binary but multiple-huge complexity and variation • Novel relations emerge all the time • From attempts to articulate atmospheric concentrations of CO2 with how you get to school to the EPAS1 gene that separates Tibetans and Han Chinese • Need to get some sort of handle on it

  5. Bio-social relations • Vary by; • Relevance • Negotiability • Novelty

  6. Affect and Novelty • ‘Affect’ – Deleuze and Guattari • Simply points out that ‘things’ have powers to affect and be affected by other things • This goes for bugs, machines and people • I use this concept to guide me as I study the emergence of novel bio-social relations

  7. Meningitis: affective communities Here’s an account of a novel bio-social relation in formation

  8. Neisseria Meningitidis

  9. Commensal bacterium Lives in nose and throat of 30% • Interacts with human epithelial cells and immune cells • Helps sustain immunity • Normally this affective community makes no connection with community of human whole organisms even though it shares ‘substance’

  10. Epidemic • New strain of Neisseria meningitidis, or • Immune suppressed population, or • Weather conditions • Can enter blood stream • Can cross blood-brain barrier • Can cause swelling of meninges

  11. Meninges

  12. Meningitis Belt

  13. Novel connection • Normally community of bugs and cells and community of humans can ignore each other • 1996 Kano Nigeria • Pfizer took opportunity to test a new antibiotic on infected children • Parents issued a thicket of compensation claims • Grounds: lack of informed consent

  14. Mosquito: affective strategy • Here’s an account of a second novel bio-social relation in formation

  15. Mosquito device

  16. Inner ear (human)

  17. Hearing loss by age

  18. Novel connection • A new bio-social relation has been formed between affects of young ears and affects of high frequency sound making device • It means shopkeepers don’t have to talk to youngsters • ‘Bad’ aspects of consumers can be abolished • Formal and informal protest by young

  19. You tube • Mosquito (teenage deterrent)

  20. Problem These are very different events Affective relations in the bio-social overlap are, of their nature, heterogeneous and highly localised What is the core or organising principle around which knowledge of them can accumulate ?

  21. Metaphor Alert!‘Strange Attractors’

  22. Imagine • Whirly coin collector – end is an attractor • Marble rolling in a bowl – path is an attractor • ‘Strange’ attractor never repeats but a pattern emerges over many iterations

  23. Three ‘attractors’ • Life • Voice • Resource • You can trace these through my two examples • In my metaphor these are strange attractors – room for novelty but you have a guide to pattern.

  24. Life, voice and resource • Can be used to: • Orient research topic within bio-social space • Pathfind between aspects of a topic • Compare findings from different locations • Sensitise to connections between life-processes and social processes

More Related