[Sci-tech-public] STS Circle, April 21 - Susan Greenhalgh (Please RSVP)

[STS]

STS Circle at Harvard
[image.png]
Susan Greenhalgh
Harvard, Anthropology

on

Obesity, Inc.? Fat Science and Policy in the People's Republic of Science

Monday, April 21
12:15-2:00 pm
Room 100F, Pierce Hall, 29 Oxford Street

[image.png]

Lunch is provided if you RSVP.
Please RSVP to sts<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu>@hks.harvard.edu<mailto:sts at hks.harvard.edu> by 5pm Wednesday, April 16.

Abstract: In recent decades, the large corporation has acquired a sprawling role in social and political life. Corporate funding of science is now a fact of life, producing widespread concern in the West about the implications for public health and human well-being. One would expect such problems to be amplified in China, where a slimming-down state pursuing an economy-first growth strategy has constructed an environment highly friendly to Western corporations. In this informal presentation, anthropologist Susan Greenhalgh talks about her recent fieldwork on the science and policy of Chinese obesity, one byproduct of the nation’s rush to Western-style development. While sharing her empirical findings and theoretical reflections, she also tells a methodological tale about the dynamics of  anthropological field research on science-making in a country in the midst of constant, confounding flux. In this crazy-quilt kind of environment, where nothing is quite what it seems, how does one frame “a question,” define “the field,” locate “informants,” and respond to new, unexpected issues that emerge in the course of research? On returning “home,” how does one create a scholarly story to tell when the data refuse to triangulate, the relevant literature is scattered across multiple fields, and the stories from the field seem to proliferate without end?

Biography:  Susan Greenhalgh is Professor of Social Anthropology and John King and Wilma Cannon Fairbank Professor of Chinese Society at Harvard. Her projects have focused on the science and governance of human life in the fields of in biomedicine, population management, and public health. She is best known for her book Just One Child: Science and Policy in Deng’s China, which won the 2010 Rachel Carson Prize of the Society for Social Studies of Science. More recently she has been studying the biopolitical workings and effects of the anti-obesity campaign, initially in the U.S. and now in China and the world at large.




A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
Follow us on Facebook: STS at Harvard<http://www.facebook.com/HarvardSTS>




_______________________________________________


-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20140414/9f6d553a/attachment.htm
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image.png
Type: image/png
Size: 4628 bytes
Desc: image.png
Url : http://mailman.mit.edu/pipermail/sci-tech-public/attachments/20140414/9f6d553a/attachment.png