Events

Anna M. Agathangelou (York University, Political Science), "Emerging Legal and Forensic BioConstitutional Order(s) in Post-Conflict Cyprus"

Sandwich lunches are provided. Please RSVP to sts@hks.harvard.edu by Wednesday at 5PM the week before.

Abstract: The engineering and co-emergence of life and value, bodies and the body politic is a major aspect of world politics today. I conjunct two sites, that is the court and the forensic lab, in Cyprus and the EU, to survey and explore their co-production. Focusing on a Cypriot legal case of a ‘missing’ soldier of the 1974 war in Cyprus who was exhumed and identified in 2005 via both the domestic and the European court, I trace how and what socio-technical imaginaries (Jasanoff) make their way into the legal and social order in order to show their effect on the emergence of a bioconstitutional order. Using the exhumation and the identification of the corpse project as muse, this presentation considers how humans are actively engineering a bioconstitutional order, creating the conditions for contemporary and future governance.  This new engineering of the bioconstitutional order projects a future for STS devoted to engaging life sciences (i.e., the lively world of capital).

Biography:  Agathangelou is a Fellow with the Program on Science, Technology and Society at the John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. She teaches Political Science and is a member of Institute and Science and Technology at York University. She is also the co-founder and co-organizer of the section on Art, Science and Technology (STAIR), International Studies Association (March 2014).She is working on a book, informed by three years of participant-observation in the courts and forensic labs in Cyprus about the co-production of law and science around the humanitarian issue of the “missing” post-conflict. She is the author of the Global Political Economy of Sex: Desire, Violence and Insecurity in Mediterranean Nation-States (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2004); co-author with L.H.M. Ling of Transforming World Politics: From Empire to Multiple Worlds (Routledge, 2009); co-editor with Nevzat Soguk of Arab Revolutions and World Transfromations (Routledge, 2013) and co-editor with Kyle D. Killian (2015) Time, Temporality, and Violence in International Relations: (De) Fatalizing the Present, Forging Radical Alternatives.  Routledge