*STS Circle at Harvard* *[image: line.gif] * * * *Christophe Bonneuil * *CNRS and INRA-Sens, France * * * on
*To See or Not to See Transgenes in Mexican Landraces: Global Science and Cultural Domination * Monday, October 4th 12:15-2:00 p.m. 124 Mt. Auburn Street, Suite 100, Room 106 [image: line.gif] Lunch is provided. Please RSVP to [email protected] by Thursday, September 30th. *Abstract: *An intense dispute has grown in the last decade around genetically modified maize in Mexico, flamed in 2001 by a publication in Nature reporting the presence of transgenes in traditional landraces grown in a remote mountain area of Oaxaca state. A PNAS article was published in 2005 reporting to have found no transgenes in the same area, but then, in 2007-2009, new positive data was published. This data, however is still disputed. How can invisible transgenes can be turned into visible signals that unmask their presence? Who has the power to make a "genetic contamination” in Mexican landscapes become a tangible and authoritative fact (and for whom? Whose knowledge and whose practices is given importance to in the production of this evidence and its certification by peer-reviewed journals? Co-authored with Jean Foyer (Cnrs, Paris), this paper documents the plurality of knowledge making practices to make sense of the escape and circulation of transgenes in Mexican maize fields. And we analyze how certain norms of scientificity and certain technical standards of detection embody power relations and cultural norms that tend to silence other forms of living and knowing. *Biography: *Christophe Bonneuil is a Senior researcher at the Centre A. Koyré of History of Science (CNRS and IFRIS, Paris), presentlty visiting scholar at Harvard's STS program. He is interested in how nature (biodiversity, heredity, crops) has been co-constituted into (shifting and situated) objects of knowledge and objects of government since Darwin. After a PhD on science and the disciplining of nature in the French colonial empire (1997), he has been investigating the epistemic, social, political and cultural aspects of plant genetics from Mendel to post-genomics. A complete list of STS Circle at Harvard events can be found on our website: http://www.hks.harvard.edu/sts/events/sts_circle/
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