
Melinda CooperThe University of Sydney · Department of Sociology and Social Policy
Melinda Cooper
Universite de Paris VIII (Vincennes a St-Denis)
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42
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Introduction
Publications
Publications (42)
Liquid Foundations—Debt, Default and the Limits of Epistemology e critique of epistemology has assumed an unusually prominent role in academic reection on the recent nancial crisis. As the consequences of the subprime debacle continue to unfold in scal crises of the state, austerity measures, currency wars, and mass unemployment, attention has turn...
In recent years, theoretical inquiries into the changing forms of labor and money have proceeded alongside each other but have rarely entered into dialogue, much less investigated the evolving relationship between the two terms. This is a curious omission given that contemporary processes of financialization involve an ever-tighter entanglement bet...
Contemporary approaches to finance as diverse as performativity theory and Marxist value-form theory have a tendency to lapse into a dogmatic structuralism that merely replicates the orthodoxies of financial economics. These approaches are unable to account for the possibility of either systemic failure or historical rupture in the organization of...
Rising inequality is the defining feature of our age. With the lion’s share of wealth growth going to the top, for a growing percentage of society a middle-class existence is out of reach. What exactly are the economic shifts that have driven the social transformations taking place in Anglo-capitalist societies?
In this timely book, Lisa Adkins,...
In the wake of the global financial crisis, a number of high profile economists have sought to revive Alvin Hansen's Depression-era theory of "secular stagnation" to account for the stagnant tendencies in the American economy, citing Japan as a cautionary tale of combined demographic and economic decline. Following Hansen, it is argued that the lon...
Tra il pullulare di discorsi sul capitalismo avanzato spicca l'assenza di analisi sui corpi. Sono in tanti a focalizzarsi sul capitalismo cognitivo, trascurando il versante della produzione materiale sul quale si fonda l'economia della vita. Melinda Cooper e Catherine Waldby con questo libro colmano tale lacuna, mostrando come la bioeconomia si sia...
This article addresses the rise of faith-based emergency relief by examining the US President's Emergency Plan for HIV/AIDS (PEPFAR), a public health intervention focused on the AIDS epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa. It argues that the theological turn in humanitarian aid serves to amplify ongoing dynamics in the domestic politics of sub-Saharan Afri...
This book explores the proliferation of various forms of embodied, transactional work associated with the lower echelons of the biomedical and pharmaceutical industries. It argues that activities such as surrogacy, tissue donation and clinical trials should be understood as a specific kind of post-Fordist service work, continuous with but also dist...
This article questions the culturalist and civilizational taxonomies of postsecular theory by redirecting attention toward the practical consequences of public theology in the realm of neoliberal welfare reform. Tracing the simultaneous rise of faith-based welfare and the religious Right in the United Kingdom, the United States, the Middle East, an...
The essay identifies workfare as the exemplary form of contingent labor practice inasmuch as it blurs the boundaries between the free and unfree labor contract, welfare and work, flexibility and compulsion. However, analyses of workfare have too often ignored the centrality of sexual politics to the tendencies of welfare and labor reform. Arguing t...
Amongst the many calls for regulatory reform voiced in the wake of the global financial crisis, the contributions of Andrew G. Haldane and his colleagues at the Bank of England stand out as some of the most politically and intellectually ambitious. In 2009, Haldane, the Bank's Executive Director of Financial Stability, delivered a speech advocating...
The concept of ‘resilience’ was first adopted within systems ecology in the 1970s, where it marked a move away from the homeostasis of Cold War resource management toward the far-from-equilibrium models of second-order cybernetics or complex systems theory. Resilience as an operational strategy of risk management has more recently been taken up in...
Focusing on the speculative methodologies used to generate models of the financial and meteorological future, this article develops a series of theses on the ‘evental’ and ‘atmospheric’ quality of contemporary power. What is at stake in the circulation of capital today, I argue, is not so much the exchange of equivalents as the universal transmutab...
The identification and valorization of unacknowledged, feminized forms of economic productivity has been an important task for feminist theory. In this article, we expand and rethink existing definitions of labour, in order to recognize the essential economic role women play in the stem cell and regenerative medicine industries, new fields of biome...
This article reflects on the convergence of revolutionary anti-capitalism and moral fundamentalism in the contemporary Islamic revival. It is concerned more generally with the recurrent appeal to fundamental value — of a sexual, genealogical or economic kind — in the history of anti-imperial and anti-capitalist movements. Exploring the tradition of...
cases, they are proving ineffective, as women and couples prioritise economic security and career development over the production of large families. The reasons for this shift in priorities are complex, intertwined, as Neilson notes above, with transformations in the biopolitical ordering of life. 3 These transformations could be summarised as the...
The State Food and Drug Administration of China has reported a dramatic increase in multicentre, multinational clinical trials over the past several years. This is in keeping with a growing trend towards the off-shore outsourcing of clinical trials from North America and Western Europe to 'nontraditional locations' such as Eastern Europe, China, an...
What is now familiarly referred to as the ‘embryonic stem (ES) cell’ is a recent biological category whose origins lie in
research into benign and malignant teratomas carried out in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. In these studies, the question of the
normal or pathological character of the ES cell was a matter of considerable debate and indeed the term ES...
Edited by Melentie Pandilovski, the publication represents a significant undertaking and an authoratative resource on the international biotech art genre. As a part of the project, the AEAF commissioned texts from over 20 national and international writers, published with images from artists working in the field. Art in the Biotech Era is a compreh...
The globalization of stem cell science is increasingly being shaped by the emerging economies of the Asia/Pacific region. Undaunted and unhampered by the more established views of the commercialization of science, countries such as India are constructing models of innovation, policies and patterns of investment that challenge such orthodoxies. This...
This article considers the genealogies of the ‘bioeconomy’ by investigating shifting conceptions of life, debt and regeneration across the disciplines of biology and political economy. Returning to the post-industrial literature of the seventies, it seeks to understand how the perception of economic and ecological crisis fed into the US's decision...
There is a growing consensus, amongst policy analysts and scientists alike, that China is likely to play a key role in the scientific, clinical and commercial development of stem cell research. However, to date, there exist few detailed analyses of China's current investment in the field. After introducing the UK's recent political strategy on stem...
Taking its cue from the political rhetoric of the Bush regime, this article attempts to understand the complex relationships between neo-liberal free-marketism, evangelical faith, and the culture of life now at work in U.S. politics. It argues that the claims of unborn life are central not only to the sexual politics of the religious right but also...