Rivalry and red tape
Researchers are suffering as a result of the conflicts between funding agencies. T. V. Padma uncovers plans to heal the rift.
Governing stem cell science in China and India: emerging economies and the global politics of innovation
Stem cell science is a volatile political arena. Propelled by the scientific and economic promise of important new health technologies, stem cell science has produced politicisation across the international, regional and national policy domains. Concerned lest they should lose an important opportunity, the emerging economies of China and India are introducing policies designed to improve their global competitive position in this field. Given that their science, tax regimes, regulation, supporting industries and financial markets are at a different stage of evolution to that of the developed economies, China and India bring their own unique characteristics to the fluid politics of stem cell globalisation. This paper analyses their approaches to innovation in stem cell science and their distinctive contribution to the dynamics of the global political competition.
Pedagogy of the “Not”: Negation, Exodus, and Postdigital Temporal Regimes
Postdigital capitalist time is an incessant acceleration that acts to homogenize time and wed us to the present, to which we have to constantly catch up. While the impulse of this is no doubt economic (the realization of value), it is crucially undergirded by a pedagogical logic wherein we have to perpetually learn and re-learn the latest apps, social media configurations, operating systems, and so on. Political strategies of resistance thus need to be bolstered by an alternative mode of educational life, and I propose a pedagogy of the “not” as one possibility. Such a pedagogy is an act of suspension that sustains a detachment from the present, clearing out oppositions and thereby exposing us to a radical indeterminacy and potentiality that is always untimely. Suspension is the praxis of negation, which means that negation operates by keeping sense indeterminate to meaning and signification. Rather than suppressing, disavowing, or annihilating the stated content, negation retains even that which is negated. While this would appear as a form of exopedagogy, which withdraws from the dialectic of the private/public, I instead argue that it redefines the terms of any dialectic, redefining the very categories exopedagogy withdraws from. Before concluding, I spend some time with Sandy Grande’s important critiques of Eurocentrism and progress in Western critical education, demonstrating how negation as suspension circumvents these errors through its accommodation of—or, better, insistence on—variegated temporalities and forms of life.