Papers by Becky Mansfield
The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neolib... more The neoliberal university requires high productivity in compressed time frames. Though the neoliberal transformation of the university is well documented, the isolating effects and embodied work conditions of such increasing demands are too rarely discussed. In this article, we develop a feminist ethics of care that challenges these working conditions. Our politics foreground collective action and the contention that good scholarship requires time to think, write, read, research, analyze, edit, organize, and resist the growing administrative and professional demands that disrupt these crucial processes of intellectual growth and personal freedom. This collectively written article explores alternatives to the fast-paced, metric-oriented neoliberal university through a slow-moving conversation on ways to slow down and claim time for slow scholarship and collective action informed by feminist politics. We examine temporal regimes of the neoliberal university and their embodied effects. We then consider strategies for slowing scholarship with the objective of contributing to the slow scholarship movement. This slowing down ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 2015, x (x), x -xx 3 represents both a commitment to good scholarship, teaching, and service and a collective feminist ethics of care that challenges the accelerated time and elitism of the neoliberal university. Above all, we argue in favor of the slow scholarship movement and contribute some resistance strategies that foreground collaborative, collective, communal ways forward.
Global Environmental Politics
Given their value for both agriculture and biodiversity, seeds are the target of controversial ef... more Given their value for both agriculture and biodiversity, seeds are the target of controversial efforts to establish intellectual property rights and variety protections that regulate sale, exchange, and breeding of genetic resources. This article examines seed governance in Turkey, a country in which many farmers continue to rely on “traditional” wheat varieties. It analyzes the tensions and ambiguities in seed governance that arise at the intersection of Turkey's goals of development and diverse priorities imposed by international frameworks. Seed governance is the product of an open-ended process of strategic elaboration among constituencies involved in trade, agriculture, development, and conservation. Although contradictions among international regulations present an array of choices, many countries including Turkey adopt laws that favor commercialization and privatization. This convergence results not simply from imposition of regulation from above, but also from developing countries' adoption of dominant global perspectives on the “modern” seed and agricultural progress.
Economic Geography, 2011
Benner, C and Berndt, C and Coe, N and Engelen, E and Essletzbichler, J and Glassman, J and Gluec... more Benner, C and Berndt, C and Coe, N and Engelen, E and Essletzbichler, J and Glassman, J and Glueckler, J and Grote, M and Jones, A and Leichenko, R and Leslie, D and Lindner, P and Lorenzen, M and Mansfield, B and Murphy, JT and Pollard, J and Power, D and Stam, E and Wojcik, D and Zook, M and Economic Geography Workshop, (2011) Emerging Themes in Economic Geography: Outcomes of the Economic Geography 2010 Workshop. ECON GEOGR , 87 (2) 111 - 126. 10.1111/j.1944-8287.2011.01114.x. ... Full text not available from this repository.
Environmental epigenetics is a 'hot' new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms t... more Environmental epigenetics is a 'hot' new field of post-genomic science investigating mechanisms that influence how genes are expressed. It offers a dynamic and non-dualistic understanding of the relationship between environments, genes, bodies, and health. We ask how this new science of biological plasticity is changing existing concepts of normality and abnormality. We find that epigenetics is contributing to a new biological (yet non-determinist) ontology of race and that the fetus and reproductive women are emerging as the central figures in this new epigenetic model of race and bodily plasticity. We find that epigenetics is a science of variation in which biological difference is figured as both normal (inevitable) and abnormal (a sign of disruption); it then seeks to improve life by identifying therapies to cure epigenetic 'abnormalities'. In this way, epigenetics emerges as a reproductive science, in which the 'uterine environment' is figured as the key space-time of epigenetic becoming. We argue that in this focus on abnormality and improvement, epigenetics is tied to a eugenic logic, even as it rejects notions of genetic determinism. While it might seem that epigenetic models of plastic life should eliminate race by eliminating notions of discrete kinds given in nature, it appears that epigenetics offers a new form of racialization based on reproductive processes of becoming rather than on pre-given nature.
ABSTRACT This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of c... more ABSTRACT This paper draws on the Foucauldian notion of biopower to renarrate the development of conservation science in the US as a form of liberal biopolitical rule. With its emphasis on making nature live, conservation marks a shift away from a sovereign form of rule that emphasized subduing and controlling nature; today, nature is ruled not by the sword but by science. Through a discussion of key concepts in conservation biology-populations in crisis; evolution and its future orientation; extinction as death that is necessary for life; and diversity as purity-we illustrate the truth discourses, underlying logics, and calculative technologies by which distinctions within nonhuman life are made and made meaningful. We argue that conservation is biopolitical not just in that it moves from controlling individuals to statistically managing populations and species, but also in that it extends the racialized logic of abnormality in its core notions of biological diversity and purity. In the logics of conservation and race, life produces diversity, conceived as variety of biological kinds; within that diversity exist kinds that foster ongoing life, which should be maximized, and kinds that are threats, which should be let die in the name of life in general.
... by examining its role within the larger project of neoliberalism and analyzing its significan... more ... by examining its role within the larger project of neoliberalism and analyzing its significance for ... What analysis of privatization finds, then, is that which is progressive is linked to that ... First, the deeply transformative nature of privatization is itself a spark to more general resistance. ...
ABSTRACT 'Seafood consumption advisories' that tell childbearing women which fish... more ABSTRACT 'Seafood consumption advisories' that tell childbearing women which fish they should and should not eat are the dominant public health response to the accumulation, in otherwise healthful fish, of environmental pollutants that are harmful to developing fetuses. These advisories are not merely a rational response to an environmental health dilemma but, rather, a form of gendered biopolitics of responsibility for population security. First, because advisories encourage individuals to self-manage risk by altering their lifestyles, they are exemplary of contemporary neoliberal public health approaches that make individuals responsible not only for their own well-being but also for the well-being of the population. Second, advisories also combine elements of reproductive politics, including the medicalization of pregnancy, the production of fetal personhood, and enduring notions about 'good' and 'bad' mothers. As such, advisories are a gendered technology of biopolitics that intensifies the self-disciplining of women as mothers of potential, future children. In making these arguments, the paper draws from Foucault's lectures and from extensive feminist literature on reproduction and mothering to develop an understanding of biopolitics as an apparatus of power that integrally links liberal regulation and individualized discipline, and does so in ways that are both reflective and productive of gendered relations.
ABSTRACT Xenobiotic chemicals (for example, PCBs, BPA and methylmercury) play a central role in t... more ABSTRACT Xenobiotic chemicals (for example, PCBs, BPA and methylmercury) play a central role in the new field of ‘environmental epigenetics’, which identifies factors that regulate the expression of genes, thereby suggesting the fundamental plasticity of biology. This article examines the role of race in the emerging ‘epigenetic biopolitics’ of environmental chemicals. Analysis of the paradigmatic case of methylmercury contamination in fish reveals a new racial formation in which race is important precisely because biology is plastic. Because methylmercury affects fetal neurodevelopment, US regulatory agencies aim to control fetal exposures by issuing fish consumption advisories to women of childbearing age. Owing to racial disparities in fish consumption, not only do the advisories have greater impact on women of color, but they change the problem from contamination itself to the abnormal diets of these women. Then, to the extent that these women fail to make the right choice, this leads to bodily differences between people of purportedly different races. In this epigenetic biopolitics, in which the aim is to affect cellular processes of the developing fetus, it is the reproductive woman who is racialized and who, through her actions, produces embodied race.
Environmental pollutants are now widespread not only in the environment but in human bodies. Seaf... more Environmental pollutants are now widespread not only in the environment but in human bodies. Seafood is one of the main sources of human exposure to many of these chemicals, with concern mainly about effects on fetal development. This article examines toxicological, epidemiological, and other public health scholarship on contaminated seafood to understand how these environmental health concerns are constituted as
Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 2014
ABSTRACT
The SAGE Handbook of Political Geography, 2008
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Papers by Becky Mansfield