Introduction

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Notes

 1 The first two conferences were held at the University of Chicago. The first was in June 2011 and was on an attempt to rethink and reconceptualize the fact/value distinction. The second was in November 2011 and focused on experimental biology and contemporary changes in experimental biology under the sign of what is often called translational research. A fourth was held at the University of California, Davis, in April 2013, on property and intellectual property. See www.knowledge-value.org for details and information about all the conferences (accessed August 11, 2014).

 2 This collection contains a subset of papers presented at the conference and includes essays by Judith Farquhar and Lili Lai, Zhen Yan and Hu Yingchong, Jean-Paul Gaudillière, and Allison Fish. Additionally, at the conference, papers were presented by Orit Halpern, Kim Fortun, Thomas Mullaney, Marisol de la Cadena, Sabina Leonelli, Sharon Traweek, and Helen Scalway (in conversation with Gail Davies). Some of the presented papers that are not in this collection are forthcoming in other venues. The respective authors can be contacted for details.

 3 Conference papers by Mullaney, Leonelli, Traweek, and Halpern all address this question.

 4 Conference papers by de la Cadena, Mullaney, Farquhar and Lai, Fish, Gaudillière and Pordié, Scalway and Davies, and Fortun are relevant to this problem.

 5 See Bowker Memory Practices, and Zhen and Hu, this issue.

 6 See de la Cadena 2013.

 7 Conference paper by Leonelli addresses this.

 8 See Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” (2002), for an example.

 9 See Jasanoff 2004 for the notion of coproduction.

10 See also the Farquhar and Lai article in this issue for an ethnographic and social survey case of epistemological sorting in the context of a strong public agenda.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Judith Farquhar

Judith Farquhar is Max Palevsky Professor of anthropology and social sciences at the University of Chicago. Her research on traditional Chinese medicine, modern Chinese embodiment and everyday life, and the nationalities medicine movement in China has broadly focused on the anthropology of knowledge and popular practices of nurturing life. She is the author of Knowing Practice: The Clinical Encounter of Chinese Medicine (1992); Appetites: Food and Sex in Post-Socialist China (2002); and (with Qicheng Zhang) Ten Thousand Things: Nurturing Life in Contemporary Beijing (2012).

Kaushik Sunder Rajan

Kaushik Sunder Rajan works on the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine. His work has focused on the corporatization of life science research; new technologies and epistemologies in the life sciences, such as genomics; and globally emergent technoscientific markets. He is the author of Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life (2007) and the editor of Lively Capital: Biotechnologies, Ethics, and Governance in Global Markets (2012). He has recently been the convener and leader of a series of working scholarly meetings on knowledge/value, which have explored sociopolitical aspects of science, technology, medicine, and other forms of expert practice in a global frame.