Bioinsecurity and Vulnerability (School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series)

Biosecurity has ballooned into an increasingly mundane aspect of human experience, serving as a catchall for the detection, surveillance, containment, and deflection of everything from epidemics and natural disasters to resource scarcities and political insurgencies.

Nancy N. Chen is Professor of Anthropology at University of California Santa Cruz. A medical anthropologist, she is the author of Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and Healing in China (Columbia 2003) and Food, Medicine, and the Quest for Good Health (Columbia 2009). She is also co-editor of Asian Biotechnology: Ethics and Communities of Fate (with Aihwa Ong, 2010); Bodies in the Making: Transgressions and Transformation (with Helene Moglen, 2006); and China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture (with Constance Clark, Suzanne Gottschang, & Lyn Jeffery, 2001).