Invitation to a Public lecture by Professor Stuart Kirsch
"Corporate Science"
This presentation examines how corporations strategically produce and deploy science. Building on critiques of tobacco industry sponsored science and the research practices of the pharmaceutical industry, it draws on long-term ethnography of the mining industry to argue that the problems associated with corporate science are intrinsic to contemporary capitalism rather than restricted to particular firms or industries.
Stuart Kirsch is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Reverse Anthropology (Stanford, 2006) and the forthcoming Mining Capitalism (University of California, June 2014). He has carried out long-term ethnographic research with the Yonggom people who live on both sides of the border between Papua New Guinea and West Papua (Indonesia). He has also collaborated with the Yonggom and their neighbors in their long-running political campaign and legal efforts to limit the environmental impact of the Ok Tedi copper and gold mine. He has also consulted widely on indigenous rights and environmental issues, including compensation for damages caused by nuclear weapons testing in the Marshall Islands, conservation and development in the Lakekamu River Basin of Papua New Guinea, and mining and property rights in the Solomon Islands. Professor Kirsch received his Ph.D. in anthropology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991 and taught for four years at Mount Holyoke College before joining the University of Michigan in 1995. Further information available at: http://derianga.wordpress.com