Michelle Murphy

Associate Professor
Department of History and Women and Gender Studies Institute
University of Toronto

Thursday, September 17, 2009

STS BROWNBAG
"A Conversation with Michelle Murphy"
12:00pm – 1:30pm in 8108 Social Science Building

LECTURE
"The Economization of Life"
4:00pm – 5:00pm in 8417 Social Science Building
(Reception at 3:30pm)

Lecture Abstract:
This talk examines two remarkable phenomena of the second half of the twentieth-century:  the enormous growth in population control and family planning programs; and the ascension of economic planning as a central tool and goal of governance.  It suggests that the stories of “population” and “economy” as objects of knowledge are deeply entangled. By tracing circuits of US and South Asian research, I suggest that population control belongs at the heart of the history of “economy” itself, and that studying cold war/postcolonial projects to reduce human fertility offers new insights into how life was valued and devalued after the decline of eugenics.  The term “economization of life” is used to describe the processes by which the value of life came to be calculated in terms of national and global economic growth.  Many common neo-liberal practices used today in public health and transnational development – from social marketing to calculations of “human capital”– have their origins in this earlier history of family planning and population control.

Michelle Murphy is associate professor of History and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. Murphy's work is at the intersections of science and technology studies, feminist studies, and environmental history.  She is author of Sick Building Syndrome and the Politics of Uncertainty (Duke University Press, 2006), which won the Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science.  She co-edited with Gregg Mitman and Chris Sellers the Osiris volume Landscapes of Exposure (2004), was editor of the RaceSci website for the History of Race in Science, Technology and Medicine from 1996-2006, and is currently co-organizer of the Toronto Technoscience Salon.  Her forthcoming book is titled Seizing the Means of Reproduction: Feminism, Health, and Biopolitical Topographies of Cold War America. Her current project, called Distributed Reproduction, seeks to bring histories of economics, reproduction, and chemical exposure into critical conversation.