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<TITLE>GCS seminar this Friday "Clinical Labour" </TITLE>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'>The next Department of Gender and Cultural Studies Seminar will be held this Friday September 25 from 2pm-4pm. All Welcome. <BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'><B>Theme:</B> <B>Clinical Labour – Gendered Transformations of Biomedical Research<BR>
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<B>Speakers: </B>Melinda Cooper and Catherine Waldby (USyd)<BR>
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<B>Chair: </B>Kane Race<BR>
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The rapidly expanding field of life sciences research is increasingly dominated by global commercial interests. The OECD has identified life sciences research as the next wave of innovation driving large sectors of the global knowledge economy (OECD 2006). However, if a viable medical bioeconomy is to be built, medical researchers require proprietary control of high volumes of human tissue, and access to a growing number of research subjects to test new drugs and treatments. Since the late 1990s the leading bioeconomies – the USA, Britain, parts of Scandinavia, and increasingly nations in South and East Asia – India, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore – have seen a rapid expansion in demand for both reproductive and research embryos and oöcytes, cord blood for stem cell research, and blood donation for large scale DNA databases, including national biobanks. <BR>
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While ‘donors’ subjects are essential productive agents in this burgeoning bioeconomic activity, their contribution is nevertheless understood in property law, bioethics,and government regulation as part of a national gift economy, a form of voluntarism and a function of participatory citizenship. This framework persists, despite widespread recognition of the essentially commercial nature of much biomedical research and the increasingly transactional nature of tissue ‘donation.’ In this paper, we propose the concept of ‘clinical labour’ as an alternative way of theorizing the contemporary economies of tissue exchange and their contractual forms.<BR>
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We will focus on the development of global markets for both reproductive and research oöcytes, in which generally poor oöcytes vendors sell their tissues to brokers and IVF clinics. While the USA has a high cost oöcyte market, where college educated women can sell oöcytes for considerable sums (although at some risk), reproductive brokerage companies increasingly recruit from less expensive vendors, an exemplary case of global labor arbitrage (crossing borders to recruit lower wage workers). Brokerage companies effectively mediate between wealthy and poor populations that share a racial phenotype and often a national border – notably Eastern/Western Europe and South Korea/Japan. <BR>
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In our attempt to theorize these economies, we revisit and problematize the materialist feminist tradition of thinking around ‘reproductive labour’, political economies of ‘sexual labour’ (Kempadoo; Truong; Bernstein) and more recent theories of post-fordist labour. We contend that contemporary economies of feminized, clinical labour problematize the very meaning of ‘reproduction’ assumed by the materialist tradition. We also argue that a major difference between Fordist uncompensated reproductive labour and the contemporary relations of reproduction is a denationalisation of the reproductive sphere and its exposure to global precarious labour markets. Modes of tissue exchange that were once regulated within an economy of the gift are now increasingly subject to more or less immediate forms of commodification and informal labour relations, while the national citizenship model of blood and tissue donation is undercut by emerging transnational circuits of tissue exchange. These circuits are often closely aligned with the geographies of labour migration that characterize more familiar forms of informal service labour such as prostitution, cleaning and childcare. We analyse oöcyte vending as precarious female labor in the lower echelons of the global bioeconomy, and compare it to other forms of racialized female labor, particularly sex work.<BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'><B>About the speakers:<BR>
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</SPAN><FONT SIZE="4"><SPAN STYLE='font-size:14.0px'>Melinda Cooper is lecturer in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney. She is author of <I>Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era </I>(2008). She is currently working on a book manuscript, co-authored with Catherine Waldby, called <I>Clinical Labour – Tissue Donors and Research Subjects in the Global Bioeconomy</I>.’<BR>
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Associate Professor Catherine Waldby is International Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy, Sydney University. She researches and publishes in social studies of biomedicine and the life sciences. Her books include <I>AIDS and the Body Politic: Biomedicine and Sexual Difference</I> (1996 Routledge), <I>The Visible Human Project: Informatic Bodies and Posthuman Medicine</I> (2000 Routledge),<I>Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism </I>(with Robert Mitchell, Duke University Press 2006) and <I>The Global Politics of Human Embryonic Stem Cell Science: Regenerative Medicine in Transition</I>, (with Herbert Gottweis and Brian Salter, Palgrave 2009). She has received national and international research grants for her work on embryonic stem cells, blood donation and biobanking. <BR>
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<B>Location:<BR>
</B>All seminars are held in the New Law School Annexe, Seminar Room 442, on Eastern Avenue. <BR>
This is the triangular glass building half way along on your right if entering campus from City Road Main Gate. <BR>
See the map here: <FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml">http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml</a></U></FONT> <<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml">http://www.law.usyd.edu.au/about/campus.shtml</a></U></FONT>> <BR>
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</SPAN></FONT><SPAN STYLE='font-size:12.0px'>Dr. Melissa Gregg<BR>
Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies<BR>
Main Quadrangle Building A14<BR>
University of Sydney NSW 2006<BR>
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p 02 9351 3657 | m 0408 599 359 | e mel.gregg@usyd.edu.au<BR>
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<a href="http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml">http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/staff/profiles/mgregg.shtml</a><BR>
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Enrol in our NEW Master of Cultural Studies: <BR>
<FONT COLOR="#0000FF"><U><a href="http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/postgrad/coursework.shtml">http://www.arts.usyd.edu.au/departs/gcs/postgrad/coursework.shtml</a></U></FONT> <BR>
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