The Mellon Sawyer Seminar on “Race, Empire, and the Environments of Biomedicine” will welcome, as a residential scholar, Kaushik Sunder Rajan, Professor of Anthropology and of Social Sciences and Co-Director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory at the University of Chicago. Professor Rajan’s first two books focused on the global political economy of the life sciences and biomedicine, with an empirical focus on the United States and India. Biocapital: The Constitution of Postgenomic Life, published by Duke in 2006, is a multi-sited ethnography of genomics and post-genomic drug development marketplaces in the United States and India. His second book, Pharmocracy: Knowledge, Value and Politics in Global Biomedicine (Duke, 2017), elucidates the political economy of global pharmaceuticals as seen from contemporary India.

Professor Rajan will lead a reading group focused on his most recent book, Multisituated: Ethnography as Diasporic Praxis. We’ll be reading the Introduction and Chapter 3. Email Jennifer Derr at jderr@ucsc.edu for a copy of the readings.