Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life
Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life.
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking.
Susanna Trnka is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and coeditor of Senses and Citizenships: Embodying Political Life.
Catherine Trundle is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Victoria University of Wellington and coeditor of Detachment: Essays on the Limits of Relational Thinking.
Genetic Bystanders: Familial Responsibility and the State’s Accountability to Veterans of Nuclear Tests
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Published:March 2017
Catherine Trundle, 2017. "Genetic Bystanders: Familial Responsibility and the State’s Accountability to Veterans of Nuclear Tests", Competing Responsibilities: The Ethics and Politics of Contemporary Life, Susanna Trnka, Catherine Trundle
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Engaging in theories of responsibilization, this chapter seeks to demonstrate the often intimate links between responsibilization and biopolitical claims of dependency, blame, helplessness, and culpability, and to show responsibility’s complex relationship with practices of irresponsibilization. Ethnographically, my analysis pivots around an interaction between a radiobiologist and a veteran who participated in British nuclear bomb tests in the Pacific in the 1950s, developments within experimental science that are reconfiguring the biological role of the gene in newly relational ways, and the subsequent translation of this scientific knowledge by nuclear test veterans who contextualize it within the frames of their own grievances...
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