[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, October 4 - Christophe Bonneuil - (Please RSVP)

[Harvard STS]

*STS Circle at Harvard*
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*Christophe Bonneuil
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*CNRS and INRA-Sens, France
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on

*To See or Not to See Transgenes in Mexican Landraces: Global Science and
Cultural Domination
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Monday, October 4th
12:15-2:00 p.m.
124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106

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Lunch is provided.
Please RSVP to sts at hks.harvard.edu by Thursday, September 30th.

*Abstract: *An intense dispute has grown in the last decade around
genetically modified maize in Mexico, flamed in 2001 by a publication in
Nature reporting the presence of transgenes in traditional landraces grown
in a remote mountain area of Oaxaca state. A PNAS article was published in
2005 reporting to have found no transgenes in the same area, but then, in
2007-2009, new positive data was published. This data, however is still
disputed.
How can invisible transgenes can be turned into visible signals that unmask
their presence? Who has the power to make a "genetic contamination” in
Mexican landscapes become a tangible and authoritative fact (and for whom?
Whose knowledge and whose practices is given importance to in the production
of this evidence and its certification by peer-reviewed journals?

Co-authored with Jean Foyer (Cnrs, Paris), this paper documents the
plurality of knowledge making practices to make sense of the escape and
circulation of transgenes in Mexican maize fields. And we analyze how
certain norms of scientificity and certain technical standards of detection
embody power relations and cultural norms that tend to silence other forms
of living and knowing.

*Biography: *Christophe Bonneuil is a Senior researcher at the Centre A.
Koyré of History of Science (CNRS and IFRIS, Paris), presentlty visiting
scholar at Harvard's STS program. He is interested in how nature
(biodiversity, heredity, crops) has been co-constituted into (shifting and
situated) objects of knowledge and objects of government since Darwin. After
a PhD on science and the disciplining of nature in the French colonial
empire (1997), he has been investigating the epistemic, social, political
and cultural aspects of plant genetics from Mendel to post-genomics.

A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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