Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The development, production and use of biological weapons (BW) is prohibited by international treaties. Details of this prohibition have been codified in the Biological Weapons Convention of 1972, which forms the core of the BW control regime and contains the core norms of the regime. This paper follows a reflexive approach to international norms, in which norms are not immutable, but subject to change over time and in which certain social practices can lead to norm contestation and change. Clearly such a norm contestation is more likely to have an impact on regime evolution if the norms are contested by a great power like the United States of America, rather than a norm contestation by, say Belgium.
Applying such a reflexive approach to the norms of the biological weapons (BW) prohibtion regime, the paper will proceed in four steps. It will first provide a brief outline of the conceptual underpinnings of the approach to norms of international regimes and their contestation. Second, it will describe the normative structure of the BW prohibition regime as it presented itself during the 1990s. This will be followed by an analysis of social practices within the USA, as they manifested themselves in discursive interventions by actors in the political system . The fourth step will trace the impact of this norm contestation on the international level, where the social practices to be analysed will focus on the negotiations for a Compliance Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention (BWC), their collapse and the setting-up of the so-called “New Process” to strengthen the effectiveness of the BW regime. The paper will conclude with a (preliminary) assessment of the implications of the norm contestation through the US on the international level for the future of the BW prohibition regime and its normative structure.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: The 2001 Canadian film Ginger Snaps features not a "man transformed into beast," but a teenaged girl morphing into beastly form after being attacked by a werewolf on the day she begins menstruation. Set in the liminal spaces of a suburban home and high school, Ginger Snaps is a comic horror tale of pubescent biology run amok but its terror eased with the awakening of Ginger's sexual desire. In the 2004 sequel, Ginger is but a ghostly presence imparting advice to her younger sister Brigitte, ?infected? at the end of the first film. Whereas Ginger embraced her metamorphosis, Brigitte struggles to keep her wolfishness at bay with injections of an herbal antidote. Presumed a drug addict, Brigitte is incarcerated in a rehab centre, whereupon she escapes and flees to a cabin in the wilderness. The third instalment catapults the sisters backwards in time into a fate worse than suburbia: a 19th-century Canadian fur trading outpost populated by explorers and trappers under siege by a pack of werewolves. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, this paper tracks Ginger and Brigitte through the inhospitable and biopolitical spaces of home, high school and hospital; from the margins of the city (through the forest) to the margins of the frontier nation; as they struggle with/against the bodily constraints of desire and hunger, infection and addiction, terror, love, and death.

Publication Type: Poster
Abstract: Lombroso, often called the father of criminology, explicitly integrated biological and evolutionary concepts into his general theory of criminals; this approach to understanding criminal behavior persists among European criminologists. However, criminologists in the United States have generally followed the Chicago School of criminology, preferring social explanations for criminal behavior over biologically informed explanations. Nevertheless, the biological sciences have played an increasingly important part of criminological explanations over the past thirty years among American criminologists. This study sought to assess the current status of biological correlates, including IQ, genetics, hormones, evolutionary psychology, and neurology among criminologists through a recent electronic survey of the 2007 ASC membership. Findings are compared to similar questionnaires surveying the 1986 ASC membership and the 1997 ASC membership.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: Abstract: Most past menopause research documents women’s “symptom” rates to investigate how women experience menopause, which reduces menopause to an individual biological event. In contrast, this paper argues that menopause must be examined as a social event that is influenced by cultural ideas about gender, race and sexuality. Based on findings from a qualitative study of a diverse sample of 30 postmenopausal women, I illustrate how women's menopausal experiences are shaped by midlife stress; women’s expected roles to provide care; heavy bleeding at work and the cultural expectation that menstrual blood should be hidden; doctors who treat women of color with disrespect; and past sexual abuse. This paper concludes that analyzing the meaning of menopause illuminates how some women's difficult experiences with menopause are rooted in culture, not biology.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Based on 40 in-depth interviews with obstetrician-gynecologists, I examine the link between biology and claims of expertise. Specifically, I examine the differences between male and female ob-gyn\'s in how they use personal biological experiences as claims of expertise. I present four strategies of \"biological empathy\" (embracing, rejecting, selecting, and substituting) and argue that both male and female ob-gyn\'s mix and match different strategies in presenting their claims of expertise. While female ob-gyn\'s were aware of, and often claimed biological empathy as an additional form of expertise, they remained reluctant to endorse it whole-heartedly. Both male and female ob-gyn\'s further expressed selectivity in their claims of biological empathy, and further provided substitute forms of expertise as well. I conclude by examining the broader implications of using biological experience as a claim of expertise, and how this might provide a different insight into existing theories of professional expertise.