Lively Capital

Lively Capital is an urgent and important collection of essays addressing the reconfigured relations between the life sciences and the market. Working at the intersection of science and technology studies and social and cultural anthropology, prominent scholars investigate the relationship of biotechnology to ethics, governance, and markets, as well as the new legal, social, cultural, and institutional mechanisms emerging to regulate biotechnology. They address matters such as genomics, pharmaceutical marketing, intellectual property, environmental science, clinical trials, and patient advocacy as they are playing out around the world, in North and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Lively Capital is not only about the commercialization of the life sciences: its institutional histories, epistemic formations, and systems of valuation. It is also about the lively affects - the emotions and desires - involved when technologies and research impinge on experiences of embodiment, kinship, identity, disability, citizenship, accumulation, or dispossession. At stake in the commodification of the life sciences are opportunities to intervene in and adjudicate matters of health, life, and death.