The biopolitics of college-level virtual research collectives : the case of stem cell research

• Technoscientific collective literacies (5 controversies over a 15 week period - public presentation and inclusion before final positioning)
• Issue of stem cell research - college science virtual research collectives, interdisciplinary pedagogy "rationality islands" (Fourez)

• Biopolitics (Foucault): the constitution, growth, accumulation and improvement of human capital - how modernity put life at the explicit center of political calculation - power with life in its calculus is a form of biopower operates through institutional, epistemic and discursive mechanisms - life, labour, language (Sunder Rajan, 2006) Sunder Rajan and the Biopolitical

• How “collectivities-of-the-similar”

  • 1) enable and disable forms of human capital

  • 2) capitalise upon discourse within larger-scale research collectives

• Assumptions, implications and consequences regarding normative appeals to :

  • transparency

  • accountability

  • legitimacy

  • in the name of alleviating human suffering and enabling human survival.