The Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology, and Computing (CASTAC) of the General Anthropology Division (GAD) and the Society for the Anthropology of Work (SAW) announce that S. Lochlann Jain (Stanford University) is the winner of the 2014 Diana Forsythe Prize for her book Malignant: How Cancer Becomes Us (University of California Press, 2013) and that Adriana Petryna (University of Pennsylvania) has been awarded an Honorable Mention for her book When Experiments Travel: Clinical Trials and the Global Search for Human Subjects (Princeton University Press, 2009). The Prize Committee chose these books from among a remarkable set of nominated volumes.
Fashioned as a melancholic and justice-seeking expedition to and through “the kingdom of the ill” and permeated by a raw and highly evocative imagery of the ways “cancer becomes us,” Malignant is a masterpiece. It epitomizes the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s lasting feminist contributions to science and technology studies. Critical and self-reflexive at every turn, Lochlann Jain illuminates the messy, unstable, cultural-historical-biological reality of cancer. With an authorial voice at once intimate and authoritative, she breaks open expert knowledges of all kind and delivers the disturbing news that cancer is part of the American way of life, hard-wired into the operating systems of the U.S. polity and economy. Lochlann Jain also reveals the many ways in which the suffering of cancer patients, particularly women, is sanitized through a set of survivor scripts that cause their own kind of suffering. In our “laboratory of toxic waste” in which accountability is diffuse and hard to pin down, the cancer which wreaks havoc on individual bodies and lives is folded into logics of individual survivorship, statistics, medical knowledge (or its lack), pharmaceutical reason, gendered normativity, and genetic predispositions and becomes impossible to read politically. Malignant speaks expertly to the legacy of Diana Forsythe who was, like Lochlann Jain, concerned with politics behind expert systems of knowledge production and consumption. With its realism, sophisticated analysis, alter politics, joy de vivre and human force, Malignant is anthropology at its best. It will certainly continue to reach and transform multiple audiences and, in the process, open up new fields of inquiry and action.
Adriana Petryna’s When Experiments Travel is recognized and honored for pioneering the anthropological inquiry of the global clinical trials enterprise, for its rich ethnographic contributions to our understanding of health capitalism, and for its original theoretical work on “experimentality” and “ethical variability.” The book provides a rich and compelling account of the organizational cultures and labor regimes of industry-sponsored clinical research, probing scientific, ethical, and regulatory practices and thus exemplifying Diana Forsythe’s lasting contributions to anthropological research on work, science, and technology. Moving between corporate and scientific offices in the United States and research and public health sites in Poland and Brazil, When Experiments Travel documents the complex ways that commercial medical science, with all its benefits and risks, is being integrated into local health systems and emerging drug markets. The ethics of researchers, markets, and patient-subjects are a living evolving practice in which we are all implicated. Bluntly and deftly, the book exposes the contemporary problems of the instrumental use of humans for research and teases out the logic of and gaps in regulatory structures that legitimate experimentality internationally. When Experiments Travel provides academics and the wider public with a vital compass that can help us monitor and interrogate the changing scientific infrastructures of our lives.
The 2014 Diana Forsythe Prize and Honorable Mention will be awarded at the annual American Anthropological Association meetings in Washington DC, during the General Anthropology Division Awards Ceremony and Distinguished Lecture on Friday, December 5, 2015, at 1 pm in the Palladian Ballroom of the Omni Shoreham Hotel.
The Diana Forsythe Prize was created in 1998 to celebrate the best book or series of published articles in the spirit of Diana Forsythe’s feminist anthropological research on work, science, and technology, including biomedicine. The Prize is supported by Bern Shen. João Biehl, Stefan Helmreich, and Nina E. Brown composed this year’s Forsythe Prize Committee.
For more about The Diana Forsythe Prize: http://www.aaanet.org/sections/gad/awards/
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