Making Bio-Expectations
Vitamin A and the inventiveness of reductionism
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2181391 |
|---|---|
| Authors | David Factor, David C Factor (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2015 |
| Volume | 8 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 292-308 |
| Publication date | 2015-05-04 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Cultural Economy (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1753-0350 • E-ISSN: 1753-0369 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17530350.2015.1039460 |
| OpenAlex | W1850116883 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 41 |
This paper marks one attempt to open up the boundaries of humanitarianism to the diverse effects of scientific objects, practices and technologies. It follows the frontiers of their effects with one particularly consequential practice of scientific reductionism through its implication with vitamin A deficiency. I open up how the scientific articulation of vitamin A is not simply about reductionism as a process of limiting, but one that unfolds as something more malleable, more multiple; how it is a shifting, distributed reality that speaks of the ongoing effects of reductionism as giving life to, among other things, emotive abstractions, and efforts to widen a distinctly humanitarian promise. I show how this scientific practice puts into play a set of emotive abstractions around the figure of the ‘Third World child’, un/remaking the problem as a morally tense ‘bio-expectation’ that ensures the survival of children across the generalised expanse of the Global South
Articulation (sociology · Emotive · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Limiting · Political science · Politics · Reductionism · Scientific modelling · Scientific progress · Set (abstract data type · Sociology · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Computer Science · Engineering · Health and Conflict Studies · Law · Philosophy · Race, Genetics, and Society
Constructing Childhood
Political Machines
Food Politics
Drugs for Life
Nutritionism
Two Regimes of Global Health
On the Ideology of Nutritionism
Powers of Freedom
Why Things Matter to People
Friction
The emergence of vitamins as bio-political objects during World War I
Hybrid Geographies
Things Becoming Food and the Embodied, Material Practices of an Organic Food Consumer
Enriching Lives
Nongovernmental Politics
Interview with Gayatri Spivak
The Truth from the Body
Bioexpectations
Those Things That Hold Us Together
Another Politics of Life is Possible
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |