CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2011
| Author | Wilson, Amanda McAllister |
|---|---|
| Title | From Textile Town to Biopolis: Kannapolis, NC and the Social Life of Biobanking Technology |
| Summary | Life changed suddenly on July 30, 2003 in Kannapolis, North Carolina, a Southern US textile mill town where one factory employed thousands of residents for almost one hundred years. In just one day, the factory closed and 4,340 mill workers lost their jobs. Just two years later, a billionaire investor and former mill owner announced construction of a public-private biotechnology research campus on the site of the former mill. In a radical post-industrial urban transformation, the mill was totally demolished and replaced by university-style buildings for researching both food and human genetics. A populational blood study aims to recruit 50,000 participants, one out of every three residents in the town and a neighboring county, to donate blood and medical histories to a privately-run biobank focusing on identifying biomarkers for future intellectual property licensing in the sector of genetic diagnostics. This paper will argue that, in Kannapolis, an emergent form of biocapital domination resembles mill town power relationships of the past, but in an obscure 'recombinant' postindustrial form of research trial workfare, voluntary blood donation, and speculative real estate practices operating together in a seamless web of technology. Drawing on primary and archival sources from oral histories and local newspapers, this paper will argue that churches, workplaces, hospitals, schools, and body memory form vital nodes of this technology. More than simply drawing on blood in a bank, biobank research draws on places, people, their experiences, and social relationships: to each other, to history, to church, and to a 'regime' of biomedical knowledge. |
| Supervisor | Monterescu, Daniel; Fabiani, Jean-Luois |
| Department | Sociology MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2011/wilson-mcallister_amanda.pdf |
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