[csaa-forum] new book

Catherine Waldby catherine.waldby at sydney.edu.au
Fri Feb 14 13:06:06 CST 2014


Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby Clinical Labor: Tissue donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy. (Duke University Press 2014) http://www.dukeupress.edu/Clinical-Labor  Enter the coupon code E14CLABR during checkout for a 30% discount.

This book explores the proliferation of various forms of embodied, transactional work associated with the lower echelons of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. It argues that activities such as surrogacy, tissue donation and clinical trials should be understood as a specific kind of post-Fordist service work, continuous with but also distinct from the various forms of embodied service labor that proliferate in today's postindustrial economies. Clinical labor is critical to the innovation strategies of the increasingly lucrative knowledge and service industries associated with pharmaceutical R&D and transnational surrogacy. Yet it is rarely if ever analyzed qua labor. Instead, it is considered as the exclusive purview of bioethical discourse, whose normative categories too often neglect the critical role of clinical labor within the political economy of the life sciences. This book provides a detailed account of the contemporary transnational geographies of clinical labor, mapping the contractual economies that link Indian and East European surrogates or egg donors with intending parents in North America and Western Europe, and the far-flung distribution of outsourced pharmaceutical research that recruits
human research subjects in New Jersey, Ahmedabad and Shanghai for the worldwide registration of new prescription drugs. It also situates clinical labor within a longer historical perspective, showing how human subject research and reproductive labor emerged out of the confined institutional spaces of the Fordist household, prison and clinic of the mid-twentieth century to take on the more distributed, outsourced forms of independent contract work that dominate today.

The first chapter is available on Scribd:http://www.scribd.com/doc/197850019/Clinical-Labor-by-Melinda-Cooper-and-Catherine-Waldby

[cid:image001.jpg at 01CF23F9.DE514290]




CATHERINE WALDBY| Professorial Research Fellow
Sociology and Social Policy| Faculty of Arts
THE UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY| NSW | 2006
T +61 2 9036 7206  | F +61 2 9036 9380  | M +61 0438 469 310
E catherine.waldby at sydney.edu.au<mailto:catherine.waldby at sydney.edu.au>  | W http://sydney.edu.au<http://sydney.edu.au/>

BIOPOLITICS OF SCIENCE RESEARCH NETWORK
http://sydney.edu.au/arts/biopolitics_science

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20140214/83fa9037/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.jpg
Type: image/jpeg
Size: 3976 bytes
Desc: image001.jpg
Url : http://lists.cdu.edu.au/pipermail/csaa-forum/attachments/20140214/83fa9037/attachment.jpg 


More information about the csaa-forum mailing list