Wednesday, May 30, 2018
7:00pm
The Crepe Place: 1134 Soquel Ave., SC, CA
SJRC Director and Sociology Professor Jenny Reardon will discuss with us her new book, The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice & Knowledge After the Genome (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Reardon’s research draws into focus questions about identity, justice and democracy that are often silently embedded in scientific ideas and practices, particularly in modern genomic research. Her training spans molecular biology, the history of biology, science studies, feminist and critical race studies, and the sociology of science, technology and medicine.
What Reviewers Say about The Postgenomic Condition:
“Jenny Reardon’s The Postgenomic Condition draws on decades of fieldwork to tell stories that lay bare the intricate tangle of technologies, individuals, institutions, expectations, experiments, businesses, communities, acts of resistance and superhuman efforts of grinding hard work that make up our genomic age. It is an example of the best kind of sociological writing, where specific, detailed, well-told stories are built into a powerful set of arguments with implications not only for the field in question, but for wider society too. This is a book not just about what went wrong in genomics, and how hopes for a better world go awry, it is also about what happens when our democracy encounters new technologies that refuse to sit still long enough to be understood.”
– New Scientist
“Reardon lays out a bold vision for genomics’s potential. She probes the value of the human genome from a utilitarian perspective, contending that human DNA and data constitute the raw resource of our times: a commodity whose value is to be quantified as biocapital. Thus, the postgenomic condition is about using information and knowledge as the currency from which to build a ‘genomics that is of, for, and by the people’.”
– Nature
Jenny Reardon is a Professor of Sociology and the Founding Director of the Science and Justice Research Center (SJRC) at the University of California, Santa Cruz.