Silencing (of "non survival") of many small cell entities to alleviate the suffering and "improvement" of a few larger cell entities?

  • Stem SELL Research - capital/capitalism - the generation of surplus value (Zizek, 2004) as overdetermination (Althusser, 1969) - suggests a contextual relationship, not a causal one which "disproportionly sets the stage"

  • Students discourse is tenuously politically astute : they evoke Sunder Rajans' (2006) five domains of biocapital analysis : exchange, commodities, valuation, science and globalization . Positionality moves into positioning

  • Students are already part of a (distinct) scientific collective (they are not scientists in-the-making) : they do not see themselves as informed citizens, they are "informing citizens".

  • Students discourse is homogenous both within and between (scientific) collectives. Such homogeneity may be a disadvantage to collective (scientific) endeavour s if heterogeneity (often purported as key to collective intelligence) is "true" (read essential to creativity).

  • Sovereign science ? (Agamben's State of Exception- the beginning the of a style of governance built on permanent exception.) "Agamben takes up Foucault’s distinction between bios and zoe, the former identifying existence as the object of a technique, the latter referring to life as a property of organisms ...For Agamben, the nation state operates a subsumption of naked life (zoe) under political life (bios) in so far as it grounds its sovereignty on the very notion of birth (natio)" Source. Our question of this fundamental biopolitical fracture : that between zoe and bios, between people and People. : ought we to add science and Science ?


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For those interested here is the SSHRC One-page research summary