4th Global Conference
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Tuesday 5th July - Thursday 7th
July 2005
Mansfield College, Oxford
Session 9: Innovations and Design
Chair: Monali Ranade
Convergence: 'Nanobiotech' and the Politics of
Technology
Alex
Plows
Cardiff University, United Kingdom
Nanotechnology as a ‘converged’ technological platform (CT= Converged Technologies) synthesising disciplines, domains, life and non- life is discussed with particular reference to ‘nanobiotechnology’ (nanobio). Complimenting Glimell and Fogelberg’s (2003) research documenting an emergent ‘epistemic culture’ amongst scientists researching and working on nanotechnologies, this paper traces an emergent ethnography of other engaged actors as they develop mobilization repertoires. Whilst often ambivalent about the combination of promises and risks in relation to nanobio, significant opposition to ‘technologies of control’ is emerging as a counter epistemology amongst certain predisposed UK civil society groups. Converging Technologies provide the issue around which such discourses are framed and converge. Whilst many of the specific risks and promises of CT / nanobio are definitively “new”, convergence is a useful metaphor for appreciating that broader frames in relation to potential risks and grievances, have been raised before in relation to other issues of scientific /environmental controversy, by the same actor groups; these are an emergent politics of technology.
Permacultures of Transistance in a Globalising
World? An Examination of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN)
Lucy
Ford
Department of Politics and International Relations, Oxford
Brookes University, Oxford, United Kingdom
The aim of this paper is to investigate permacultures
of transistance and in particular to
locate the phenomena of ecovillages and the global ecovillage network
(GEN) within the wider ‘movement of movements,’ or ‘anti-globalisation
movement.’
This paper will interrogate the deep green,
radical ecological analysis, which sees the need for a fundamental
transformation of modern socio-political and economic structures
and practices, requiring a decentralisation of state power, scaling
down of economic activity and transformation of capitalist relations
of production, a reclaiming of the commons and fighting enclosures
(Paterson 2001; see also e.g. Bookchin 1980; Gorz 1980). One of the
visions of this perspective is for the establishment of global networks
of self-reliant communities in order to achieve an environmentally
sustainable and socially just society.
There is a growing literature on
the movement of movements, also referred to as the anti-globalisation
movement, the global justice movement, or the pro-democracy movement.
Some of this literature, while providing rich empirical chronicles, remains
fairly under-theorised (e.g. Klein 2002; Kingsnorth 2003). On the
other hand, a literature is emerging which seeks to theorise the
nature of global resistance politics (see Gills 2001; Gill 2003;
Armstrong et.al. 2003). Within much of this literature there is a
tendency to focus on the importance of the movement itself, in its
global, transient form of ephemeral street protests, summits and
social fora, as well as its networked interlinking of localised resistances
across the globe. Relatively little has focused on resistance that
is establishing permanent, living alternatives (although see e.g.
Bennholdt-Thomsen et al 2001). This paper seeks to contribute to
such thinking, in particular in an attempt to contribute to the important
task of bringing together theoretical and empirical insights.