Date of Award
2008
Degree Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy
Program
Library & Information Science
Supervisor
Dr. Nick Dyer-Witheford
Abstract
This research critically analyses a number of the social, economic,
environmental, and informational questions that attach to biotechnology in the context of Canada’s Biotechnology Strategy. A neo-Marxist biopolitical framework that draws on a number of theoretical elements from autonomist Marxism informs the conceptual scheme. Much like Marx’s methodological orientation based on the perspective of the working class rooted in its own historical activity, contemporary efforts at understanding and situating the current conjuncture of capitalist social relations can be advanced through research into the genealogy of social and political opposition movements. By apprehending these emerging subjectivities we might begin developing a new social vision of our own era. It is precisely those struggles mobilised around biotechnology issues in Canada that this research seeks to elaborate. Drawing on documentary analysis and interviews, the research seeks to determine the role the Canadian Biotechnology Strategy has played in commodifying biotechnology and biotechnological information as part of the social factory, and to interrogate the counter struggles that have emerged to resist the enclosure of the biological and the knowledge commons, with emphasis on the information and knowledge issues encompassed by such struggles. A basic presupposition of this research is that the commodification of biotechnology, as a branch of science that has assumed a central role in production as a source of new knowledge, offers an exemplary case study of both the mobilisation of the social factory in contemporary society and the scope of counter struggles that, themselves, include a variety of information and knowledge issues
Recommended Citation
Peekhaus, Wilhelm C., "CANADA’S BIOTECHNOLOGY STRATEGY: STRUGGLES ON THE KNOWLEDGE COMMONS" (2008). Digitized Theses. 4595.
https://ir.lib.uwo.ca/digitizedtheses/4595