30 Mar Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor
TALK: Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor
Kalindi Vora (Associate Professor, Department of Ethnic Studies, UC San Diego)
Wednesday, March 30, 2016 / 12:30 PM
HSSB 5th floor, Conference Room
This talk thinks through how biological bodies have become a new kind of global biocapital, extending historical legacies of colonial labor practices. It examines how forms of labor serve to support life in the United States at the expense of the lives of people in India. Focusing on several case studies of outsourced work, it exposes the ways in which seemingly inalienable aspects of human life such as care, love, and trust—as well as biological bodies and organs—are not only commodifiable entities but also components essential to contemporary capitalism. How do these new forms of labors of care, nurture, and even biological reproductivity provide an opportunity to look at historical legacies of gender and labor that have been theorized through the lens of Ethnic Studies?
Kalindi Vora is Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at UCSD. She is author of Life Support: Biocapital and the New History of Outsourced Labor (2015). Her areas of research focus include gendered labor and globalization, science and technology studies, critical race studies, posthumanism and new materialisms, South Asian area/diaspora studies, and postcolonial theory. Her publications appear in journals including Current Anthropology, The South Atlantic Quarterly, Somatechnics, Postmodern Culture, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience.
Sponsored by the Department of Asian American Studies, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Department of Global and International Studies, and the Hull Chair in Feminist Studies.