Description
Book SynopsisIn
Genomics with Care Mike Fortun presents an experimental ethnography of contemporary genomics, analyzing science as a complex amalgam of cognition and affect, formal logics and tacit knowledge, statistics, and ethics. Fortun examines genomics in terms of care—a dense composite of affective and cognitive forces that drive scientists and the relations they form with their objects of research, data, knowledge, and community. Reading genomics with care shows how each resists definition yet is so entangled as to become indistinguishable. Fortun analyzes four patterns of genomic care—curation, scrupulousness, solicitude, and friendship—seen in the conceptual, technological, social, and methodological changes that transpired as the genetics of the 1980s became the genomics of the 1990s, and then the “post-genomics” of the 2000s. By tracing the dense patterns made where care binds to science, Fortun shows how these patterns mark where scientists are drive
Trade Review“
Genomics with Care is an inventive, generous, funny, rigorous, and path-opening contribution to the anthropology of science that teaches readers new methods of understanding science as a vocation. Mike Fortun deftly fuses attention to the social affects and effects that accompany research in today’s molecular biology. This utterly splendid book reminds us what science and science studies are
for.” -- Stefan Helmreich, author of * A Book of Waves *
“This brilliant and much-needed intervention into science and technology studies provides an affecting model for reading not just genomics, but the sciences in general. It opens a new path for thinking and writing differently in relation to the natural sciences. Indeed, it is a superb model for scholars and students who wish to read any text, community, or epistemology in a caring and critical way.” -- Elizabeth A. Wilson, author of * Gut Feminism *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii
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Tolls 1: A Prelude 1
Part I. Genomics, Double Binds, Affects
1. Fors 13
2. Labyrinth Life: Affect Excess Infrastructure 42
3. Double Binds of Science 80
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Tolls 2: An Interlude
Part II. Minding the Infrastructure of Genomics
4. Curation: Of Data’s Limits 111
5. Scrupulousness: Of Experiment’s Limit 141
6. Solicitude: Of Science’s Limit 183
7. Friendship: Of Community’s Limits 221
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Tolls 3: An Appendix 253
Postscript 259
Notes 277
Works Cited 311
Index 337
