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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
31

Revalume: Configurable Employee Evaluations in the Cloud

Li, Terrence Zone 01 March 2017 (has links)
The software industry has seen a shift from annual to more frequent quarterly and even weekly employee reviews. As a result, there is a high demand for employee evaluations to be less costly and less time-consuming, while providing key insights for richer interactions between employees and their employers or managers. Tech com- panies are constantly looking for methods of producing high quality evaluations to prevent costly turnover. In an industry where software engineers are in high demand, tech companies face a challenging problem. Issues with employee evaluations typi- cally include the lack of performance transparency, unhelpful feedback, lack of metrics, lack of time, and lack of resources. This thesis addresses these challenges through the implementation of an employee evaluation tool. Revalume is a cloud-based web application that provides a stream-lined solution of creating, routing, completing, and viewing evaluation forms. Revalume allows users to use pre-existing and configurable templates, third-party APIs, and a friendly UI to ease the evaluation process. Revalume was evaluated with a longitudinal, semi-controlled study that demonstrates meaningful improvements over existing solutions.
32

The Carceral Body Multiple: Intake in the New York City jails

Ludwig, Ariel Simone 27 March 2020 (has links)
This ethnographic dissertation project is an applied philosophical project that takes an ontological and critical phenomenological approach to the enactment of carceral bodies. This dissertation set out to answer two central questions. First, how do jail intake processes enact carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the ontological implications? Second, how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? The process of answering these questions offers an early attempt at empirical abolitionist science and technology studies research as it offers an intervention in the essentializing biomedical and criminological understandings of "the criminal." This is achieved by tracing the enactment pf carceral bodies across the domains of datafication, space, and time. First, with the advent of digital technologies, the science and technology of criminality continues to be informed by the desire to use metrics to identify and define criminal man. Like their precursors, however; when taken together these quantified characteristics contribute to the production of a body predisposed not to crime but to incarceration. This predisposition arises out of datafication and algorithmic characterization. The data comprising the raw material of this assignation pulls together the digitization of one's race, ethnicity, school (reflective of the school-to-prison-pipeline), address, sex, socio-economic status, disability status, mental health status, etc. Carceral algorithms, and the structures they arise out of, inform one's incarcerability. The carceral body of data and its risks are multiple and are represented in a number of ways, just as it is experienced variously. There are infinite permutations of the intake process across which categories come to stand in for human suffering, for risk, for job performance, etc. The data generated and its infrastructures are reflective of the broader political and socioeconomic context. The role of data collection, management, and analysis surrounding the intake process makes visible the politics and stakes of the carceral bodies enacted. The two primary epistemologies and attendant professions brought to bear upon the carceral body are medicine and criminology. These epistemologies rely upon quantification, categorization, and calculations of risk to generate data from which carceral knowledge is made (and in turn makes). This project characterizes the data infrastructures of the jails as socio-technical objects, practices, and architectures that are multiple and complex. It is through this lens that managerialism, algorithms, and knowledge production are characterized. Together, these facets provide insight into the making of carceral bodies of data and the logics and mechanisms of the carceral-data-industrial-complex. Second, this project addresses the spatialities that carceral bodies are generative of and situated in. The spaces of intake are suffused with values, politics, and epistemologies that play out in a number of ways. In order draw out these facets, the ontological approach was integrated with carceral geography. This approach elevates micro-scales of space and time, placing the personal and particular beside within the broader social and political contexts. This shift in scale has important implications for the study of correctional facilities as it is from this scale that the complexities, relationalities, materialities, contradictions, and multiplicities are visible. This approach relates to Foucault's carceral archipelago, which conveys the complexities of carceral spaces, surveillances, and their leakiness. Carceral geography's reading of Foucault requires an engagement across carceral societies that incorporates the body as a prime site from which to understand complex dynamics of control. Carceral geography offers a helpful approach drawing out spatialities enacted through performances and experiences, making concertina wire fences permeable and ever-mutable. The carceral body carries carceral spaces within it and beyond it that arise out of epistemes, policies, and practices that are mutually reinforcing and enmeshed. These embodied spaces include emotions and mental self-scapes alongside digitally recorded diagnoses and correctional designations. When considering how security infrastructures permeate society, well beyond correctional facility gates, this has important implications for this carceral society. The buildings and physical spaces of incarceration are read as reflective of the values and logics of the state, this brings into view the extra-penological function of incarceration, in which specific populations are disproportionately removed and disciplined/ punished by the state even before they are determined to be guilty or not guilty by a court. This hyper-incarceration of certain populations underlines the spatial logics of carceral networks that reflect the machinations of a neoliberal state that disappears those who have been Othered via carceral networks. This takes on even more problematic hues when considering the torturous conditions unsuitable for any creature, including humans. Third, despite Western constructs of linear or absolute time, the study of the carceral temporal body demonstrates the relativities, multiplicities, and disjunctures that challenge the notion of a universal clock. This dissertation tells of carceral bodies made into and across multiple time points. Bodies become metaphoric timeclocks through managerial oversight processes in which they are assigned varying times across different electronic record systems, with these different from their time of arrest and remand. In this space, the temporal jurisdictions diverge, giving rise to frictions and conflict. Further, these assigned temporalities differ greatly from the ways time is experienced across embodied states (e.g. experiencing acute withdrawal symptoms). The theoretical frameworks employed to understand carceral time are designed to address how carceral bodies come to be anticipated. In part, this is enacted through professional and bureaucratic routines that are often protracted and repetitive. These routines give rise to waiting and urgency. This empirical engagement with carceral temporalities draws out epistemic and experiential forces. Ultimately, this dissertation suggests that drawing out the ontological multiplicities of mass incarceration can countermand its fixities and generate abolitionist epistemologies. Abolition has generative potentials that coalesce with science and technology studies' investment in the otherwise. Over time carceral abolition has come to refer to a wide range of social movements, theoretical frameworks, and activism. The various approaches to abolition share a sense of urgency and resistance to gradual or eventual change, as this has historically led to the perpetuation and maintenance of racialized criminal justice systems and mass incarceration. Carceral epistemologies (e.g. penology, criminology, biomedicine, public health) are steeped in racisms and classisms, which inform broader imaginaries of crime and criminality. As political discourse has been reduced to simplistic chants and pithy soundbites, the aim of this dissertation has been to "complicate the discourse" surrounding the carceral-industrial-complex and the carceral body in particular. Understanding the carceral body through its ontological multiplicities serves as the grounds from which resistances to the status quo can be formulated. This is vitally important in light of the diffuse assemblages detailed in this project and the pervasiveness of carceral logics. In sum, this dissertation has demonstrated that carceral bodies are made and not born. It points to the difficult work still needed and the utility of ethnography in eliciting the multiplicities of practices and materialities in carceral settings. The abolitionist dreams arising from this project demand the embrace of ontological multiplicities as new logics and imaginaries unweave the criminal justice system. While it does not fall within the purview of this project to delineate a specific set of directives, it does suggest that abolitionist dis-epistemology requires logics and tactics equally as multifaceted and nuanced as the criminal justice system itself. / Doctor of Philosophy / This is an applied philosophy project based on ethnographic research in the New York City jails. It provides insight into the practices of jail intake as a way to draw out the ways in which carceral bodies come to be enacted. The project grows out of feminist science studies. The two central questions are 1) how do jail intake processes produce carceral bodies (analog and digital) and what are the implications? 2) how are jail intake processes reflective of the values and logics of a carceral society? These questions are addressed through the domains of data, space, and time, which serve as the organizing framework of this project. The focus on intake enactments draws out the multiplicities of carceral realities, which has the potential to resist essentializing conceptualizations of the criminal. In doing so, this dissertation project demonstrates the potential for abolitionist science and technology studies to disrupt the criminal justice status quo.
33

Reading for Health: Bibliotherapy and the Medicalized Humanities in the United States, 1930-1965

Dufour, Monique S. 20 October 2014 (has links)
In this dissertation, I tell the story of midcentury attempts to establish, develop, and study bibliotherapy in the US. I follow three groups-hospital librarians, psychologists and psychiatrists, and language arts educators-from the 1930s to the 1960s, when each in its own ways expressed belief in the therapeutic power of reading and set out to enact that belief as a legitimate practice in the evolving contexts of its profession and in the broader culture. These professionals tried to learn what happened within people during and after reading, and they attempted to use what they learned to apply reading toward healthy ends. Today, therapeutic reading has become commonplace to the extent that it seems natural. In this dissertation, I aim to recover and explore the midcentury processes by which therapeutic reading came to seem at once natural, medical, and scientific. I argue that midcentury bibliotherapy functioned in concert with an evolving cultural narrative that I call "reading for health." The reading for health narrative gathers up into a coherent story various and deep beliefs and commonplaces about the power of books over our minds and our bodies. In midcentury bibliotherapy, reading for health was reinvigorated as a story about the marriage of science and culture, a unity narrative that claimed the iconic book-capable of swaying minds and societies alike, and burnished with all that western civilization signified-for the professions that applied reading toward their healthy ends. As I demonstrate, however, these narratives were not confined to discrete professions, but functioned as a part of a larger cultural movement set upon the shifting fault lines of the humanities and science. Each of the groups I follow took an avid interest in what I have called the embodied reader. Rather than viewing reading as an act of a disembodied mind, they understood the practice as a psychosomatic experience in which mind and body could not be disconnected. Moreover, they believed that reading could capitalize on the embodied nature of thought and affect, and engender healthy effects. In this way, the embodied reader was constructed as a new, modern locus of both the literary experience and the therapeutic ethos. By valuing above all else how reading could be used to achieve health, advocates of bibliotherapy fashioned a form of applied humanities, one that defined the meaning and judged the value of books in terms of their utility and efficacy. In so doing, they contributed to the development of a form of the medicalized humanities that now resonates in three contemporary sites: (1.) the study and use of bibliotherapy in clinical psychology; (2.) the dominant and naturalized approach to books known as therapeutic reading; and (3.) the medical humanities. / Ph. D.
34

Putting indigenous knowledge on the science policy agenda in South Africa, 1994-2002

Fredericks, Azeza 10 1900 (has links)
Thesis (MPhil)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / ENGLISH ABSTRACT: The study focuses on tracking the developments accompanying the rise of indigenous knowledge (IK) and its positioning on the science policy and national research agenda in South Africa (SA). The historical occasion, the variety of policy developments in a diverse ‘new’ SA and how IK evolved, presented the impetus and context of the study. The objectives of the study were to consider more closely the roles and actions of the participants in the overall process, how they interacted and to identify broad patterns that occurred. Other areas included positioning IK as strategic science and how it was refracted through the national research system. To achieve these objectives, a significant part of the methodology involved a historical reconstruction of developments in IK. The data obtained from this reconstruction provided the basis for further analysis and closer scrutiny of the issues. Reconstructing the history assisted with providing some answers regarding the sources of concern and motivation which led to formulating policy on IK, the processes that advanced IK to its position in 2002, looking at how the various players in the research system were mobilized and how the prelegislative stage of activity determined the outcome of the IK legislative process. In addition to these questions, there was an opportunity to consider Wally’s Serote’s role as ‘moral entrepreneur and to try to understand both his personal trajectory and the role he played in the system. The historical reconstruction provided a periodization comprising three chronological phases, namely • Genesis (1994 – 1996) • Awareness Creation (1997 – 1998) • Programmes and Implementation (1999 – 2002) New policy directions in SA provided a context for positioning IK within strategic science. The leadership and passion displayed by Serote also required an understanding of his personal trajectory and the role he played in the system. IK as strategic science is positioned within framework of the moral entrepreneur’s cycle in a changing system. The historical reconstruction raised the issue of how easy or difficult it is to embed processes and how these processes co-evolve in the system. It also showed how IK was refracted through the national research system. The broad ‘success’ of the IK initiative is discussed with respect to its legislative and policy journey in SA and its current position in the research system. The ‘lesser successful’ side is also discussed in terms of the intended objectives and the eventual outcomes. Protecting IK, a central issue throughout the process, led to struggles and tensions that required rethinking both the policy and epistemic aspects of both western science and IK. / AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: Hierdie studie fokus daarop om dié ontwikkelinge te volg wat deel was van die opkoms van inheemse kennis (IK) en die posisionering daarvan op die agenda vir wetenskapsbeleid en nasionale navorsing in Suid-Afrika (SA). Die historiese gebeurlikhede, die verskeidenheid in beleidsontwikkelinge in 'n diverse "nuwe" SA en die manier waarop IK ontwikkel het, het die stukrag en die konteks vir hierdie studie verskaf. Die doelwitte van die studie was as volg: om die rolle en die aksies van die deelnemers aan die proses as geheel in meer detail te oorweeg; om hulle interaksie waar te neem en om die breë aksiepatrone te identifiseer. Ander ondersoekareas was om IK as strategiese wetenskap te posisioneer en om vas te stel hoe dit deur middel van die nasionale navorsingstelsel gerefrakteer is. Om hierdie doelwitte te kan bereik, het 'n belangrike deel van die metodologie die historiese rekonstruksie van ontwikkelinge in IK behels. Die data wat deur middel van hierdie rekonstruksie verkry is, het die basis voorsien vir die verdere analise en nadere beskouing van die relevante kwessies. Deur die geskiedenis te rekonstrueer kon sommige van die vrae oor die volgende beantwoord word: die oorsprong van sake wat kommer gewek het en die motivering wat gelei het tot die formulering van beleid oor IK; die prosesse wat IK tot die posisie daarvan in 2002 bevorder het deur te kyk hoe die onderskeie rolspelers in die navorsingstelsel gemobiliseer is; en hoe die pre-wetgewende fase van aktiwiteite die uitkoms van die IK-wetgewende proses bepaal het. Bo en behalwe die beantwoording van hierdie vrae, kon Serote se rol as morele entrepreneur ook ondersoek word om sodoende beide sy persoonlike trajektorie en die rol wat hy in die stelsel gespeel het te probeer verstaan. Die historiese rekonstruksie het 'n periodisering, bestaande uit drie chronologiese fases, verskaf, naamlik 􀂃������� Genesis (1994 – 1996) 􀂃������� Skepping van 'n Bewussyn (1997 – 1998) 􀂃������� Programme en Implementering (1999 – 2002) Nuwe beleidsrigtings in Suid-Afrika het 'n konteks verskaf vir die posisionering van IK binne die strategiese wetenskap. Die leierskap en passie wat Serote geopenbaar het, het ook begrip vir sy persoonlike trajektorie en die rol wat hy in die stelsel gespeel het, gevra. IK as 'n strategiese wetenskap is geposisioneer binne-in die raamwerk van die morele entrepreneur se siklus in 'n veranderende stelsel. Die historiese rekonstruksie het die kwessie geopper van hoe maklik of hoe moeilik dit is om prosesse in te bed, en hoe hierdie prosesse saam in die stelsel ontwikkel. Dit het ook gewys hoe IK deur middel van die nasionale navorsingstelsel gerefrakteer is. Die breë "sukses" van die IK-inisiatief word bespreek met betrekking tot die pad wat dit geloop het in die wetgewende en die beleidsvormende proses in Suid-Afrika en die huidige posisie daarvan in die navorsingstelsel. Die "minder suksesvolle" kant word ook bespreek met betrekking tot die vooropgestelde doelwitte en die uiteindelike uitkomste. Die beskerming van IK, 'n sentrale kwessie regdeur die proses, het gelei tot worstelinge en spanninge wat vereis het dat die beleids- én die epistemiese aspekte van beide die westerse wetenskap en IK herbedink moes word.
35

Imagining Performance Measurement Systems : On the field-level construction of a compensation algorithm in the pharmaceutical industry. / Imaginer les Systèmes de Mesure de la Performance : Sur la construction au niveau du secteur d'un algorithme de compensation dans l'industrie pharmaceutique.

Bottausci, Chiara 01 July 2019 (has links)
Cette thèse examine l’imagination des systèmes de mesure de la performance au sein de l’industrie pharmaceutique. Par une observation participante étendue dans une grande entreprise pharmaceutique et des entretiens dans cette industrie, les trois articles de cette thèse explorent les influences intra et extra-organisationnelles qui agissent sur la forme et les raisons des systèmes de rémunération que les sociétés pharmaceutiques utilisent pour leur force de vente. Le premier article considère que les systèmes comptables émergent d’un ensemble d’inscriptions dramatisées qui mettent en scène, encadrent et médiatisent l’interaction entre les différents acteurs, internes et externes à l’organisation, qui participent à la fabrication d’un algorithme de rémunération. Le deuxième article théorise de quelle manière moral imaginaries sont constitués en objets comptables et comment les instruments comptables agissent comme médiateur moral. Il présente les systèmes émergents de mesure de la performance en tant que dispositifs de calcul moral façonnés par les imaginaires moraux contrastés de concepteurs hétérogènes. Le troisième article se concentre sur la manière dont les systèmes de mesure de la performance émergent et se stabilisent dans le contexte des marchés, afin d'explorer les infrastructures comptables au niveau de l’industrie que permettent aux acteurs organisationnels de visualiser, rendre compte et agir sur le marché lorsque ce dernier est invisible à pour ses participants. Pour que les systèmes de mesure de la performance fonctionnent sur un marché, il est nécessaire d’avoir une collaboration au sein du secteur, des opacités construites et des processus de (de)commercialisation de l’identité des acteurs. / This thesis examines the field-level imagining of Performance Measurement Systems in the pharmaceutical sector. By means of an extended participant observation in a Big Pharma company and interviews in the pharmaceutical sector, the three articles of this thesis explore the intra- and extra-organizational influences that act upon the shape and rationales of the compensation systems pharmaceutical companies operate for their sales-force. The first article explores accounting systems as emerging from a set of dramatized inscriptions that stage, frame, and mediate interaction among the different actors, internal and external to the organization, that participate in the fabrication of a compensation algorithm. The second article theorizes in what way moral imaginaries are constituted into accounting objects, and how accounting acts as a moral mediator. It shows emergent performance measurement systems as moral calculating devices that are shaped by, and engage with, the contrasting moral imaginaries of heterogeneous designers. The third paper brings the concern with how performance measurement systems emerge and stabilize in the context of markets, to explore the field-level accounting infrastructures that enable organizational actors to visualize, account for, and act upon the market when the market is invisible to its participants. For performance measurement systems to work in a market, it is suggested, they require field-level collaboration, constructed opacities, and processes of marketization and de-marketization of actors’ identities.
36

British electricity policy in flux : paradigm ambivalence and technological tension

Emamian, Seyed Mohamad Sadegh January 2014 (has links)
Drastic changes have taken place in UK electricity policy over recent years as government has sought to address the challenges associated with energy security, affordability and commitments to reduce carbon emissions. This study investigates the underlying policy changes between the year 2000 and 2012, particularly the Electricity Market Reform, as the most fundamental transformation in the British power market since liberalisation, almost three decades ago. It illustrates that although this policy had revised the long legacy of market-based and technology neutral electricity policymaking, it was yet to be claimed as a wholesale paradigmatic shift, because, as of 2012, it still suffered from a form of paradigm ambivalence and socio-technical lock-in. Furthermore, this research identifies an accumulative process of policy change explaining how a complex set of dynamics transformed the UK electricity policy mix. The thesis relies empirically on conducting 53 semi-structured interviews as well as scrutinising policy documents and relevant secondary studies. The thesis draws relevant approaches within policy studies that attend to address continuity and change in policy frameworks, in particular the Advocacy Coalition Framework (Sabatier 1999) and Policy Paradigm (Hall 1993) perspectives. The study contributes to this literature in three distinctive ways. First, it questions the adequacy of existing frameworks for conceptualising policy change in ‘large-technical’ and ‘techno-centric’ subsystems, such as electricity policy. In return, it introduces technology preference, as a policy component capturing the socio-technical elements of electricity policymaking. Second, to explain why and how such significant changes had been undergone, it forms a bridge between the characteristics of policy change and the extent that existing policies are perceived as irreconcilable policy failures. By this, it, albeit, moves beyond the conventional typology of change drivers in policy literature. Third, this research extends the emerging concept of negotiated agreement and policy compromise as a pathway to evolutionary changes (Sabatier & Weible 2007). Inspired by Institutional Change theory (Mahoney & Thelen 2010), it proposes that compromised policies are often at the risk of policy reversibility and retrenchment, subject to any shift in the contextual conditions they have originated in. Overall, the thesis provides an understanding of one of the very complex and contemporary cases for studying policy change theories.
37

"It's Not a Real Disorder": Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder and Paradigms of Childhood Harm

Hamiter, Amelia 01 January 2016 (has links)
Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder has garnered controversy in the United States since it became a widely diagnosed disorder in American schoolchildren in the 1970s. Both diagnosis and treatment are sites of controversy. Some believe the disorder is a contrivance of parents and teachers who do not want to deal with hardly exceptional childhood difficulties, or a contrivance of pharmaceutical companies taking advantage of such parents and teachers. Others believe that a neurobiological basis for the disorder will eventually be discovered, and thus will legitimize both the diagnosis and the practice of prescribing medication for treatment. I utilize the Science, Technology, and Society approach of actor network theory to show that these multiple understandings of ADHD can coexist, since ADHD is a complex product of external and internal agents. This will demonstrate how cultural shifts and values cause parents, teachers, and doctors to evaluate childhood in a way that frames certain behaviors as harmful. I also evaluate how cultural values of medicalization center issues in the individual rather than in external factors, and assess the values that psychiatric treatment appeals to and whether they primarily serve the needs of children. I conclude that ADHD is a heavily context-dependent disorder, but that that does not delegitimize harmful effect on children who exhibit ADHD-associated behaviors. I also conclude that the current dominant medicalized approach to ADHD is not optimal because it focuses on only a few of the total factors that make ADHD a pathological disorder for children in the contemporary United States.
38

Decrypting Bitcoin Prices and Adoption Rates using Google Search

Puri, Varun 01 January 2016 (has links)
In this paper, I analyze Bitcoin price formation and adoption rates at a global and national level. In determining Bitcoin prices, I consider contemporaneous and lagged values of traditional determinants of currencies, such as inflation and industrial production, and digital currency specific factors, primarily public interest. Using monthly time-series data across five years (2011 – 2016), I find that global public interest in Bitcoin, measured by Google searches for the keyword ‘Bitcoin,’ has a positive and significant impact on Bitcoin prices. I extend the analysis to a country level by employing a proxy for adoption rates, represented by the number of local Bitcoin client downloads, which is a useful predictor of prices. I examine pooled data across 12 countries to show that searches for ‘Bitcoin’ can be used to predict adoption rates and, consequently, prices. To the best of my knowledge, this is the first academic article to study Bitcoin usage at a national level. I find that contemporaneous values of traditionally used macroeconomic determinants of currency prices, except inflation, do not have a significant impact on Bitcoin prices.
39

Power and wind power : exploring experiences of renewable energy planning processes in Scotland

Aitken, Mhairi January 2008 (has links)
Energy use and production have become highly salient within both national and international policy. This reflects an international recognition of the need to cut emissions in order to mitigate the threats of climate change. Within the UK there is significant policy support for renewable energy development generally, and wind power in particular. Nevertheless, the UK is not expected to meet its targets for renewable energy production. This is often portrayed as being the result of localised public opposition to particular proposed developments. However, this thesis challenges the notion that local objectors are powerful actors within renewable energy deployment. A detailed, multi-method case study of one planning application for a wind power development was conducted in order to explore how the planning process is experienced and perceived by various different actors involved (i.e. representatives of the developers, local objectors, local supporters). The findings refute the assertion that localised opposition presents significant obstacles for the development of renewable energy; they instead highlight the limited influence of objectors. In order to understand the many different forms of power which may be exercised the research employs Lukes’ three-dimensional view of power as a framework of how the concept is to be understood. Through this framework, the thesis does not only consider the power of objectors, but also of prospective developers and the forms of power that are found within the structures of the planning system. Power is considered to be visible not only in the outcomes of decision-making processes but also in the processes themselves. It is shown that whilst planning processes are presented as being public and democratic, considerable power is exercised in controlling the participation that is allowed and ultimately the range of outcomes which can be achieved.
40

Genomic sovereignty and "the Mexican genome"

Schwartz Marín, Ernesto January 2011 (has links)
This PhD seeks to explore the development of a bio-molecular (i.e., genomic) map as a sovereign resource in Mexico. The basic analytical thread of the dissertation is related to the circulation of genomic variability through the policy/legal and scientific social worlds that compose the Mexican medical-population genomics arena. It follows the construction of the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), the notion of genomic sovereignty, and the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP).The key argument for the construction of the INMEGEN relied in a nationalist policy framing, which considered the Mexican genome as a sovereign resource, coupling Mexican “uniqueness” to the very nature of genomic science. Nevertheless, the notion of genomic sovereignty was nothing similar to a paradigm, and was not based on shared visions of causality, since the very “nature” of the policy object —Mexican Genome— was, and still is, a disputed reality. It was through the rhetoric upon independence, emancipation and biopiracy: i.e. experiences of dispossession “in archaeology, botany or zoology” (IFS 2001: 25) that the novelty of population genomics became amenable to be understood as a sovereign matter. Therefore, the strategic reification of Mexicanhood fuelled the whole policy and the legal agenda of the INMEGEN as well, which permitted cooperation without consensus and opened the process of policy innovation. Conversely, scientists considered genomic sovereignty an unfounded exaggeration, but anyhow they cooperated and even created a new policy and scientific enterprise. Genomic sovereignty exemplifies the process of cooperation without consensus on its most extreme version .So, as the notion circulated and gradually became a law to protect Mexican genomic patrimony, the initial coalition of scientists, lawyers and policy makers disaggregated. Many of the original members of the coalition now think of genomic sovereignty as a strategy of the INMEGEN to monopolise genomic research in the country. This dissertation additionally explores the way in which the MGDP is constructed in mass media, in INMEGEN´s communication and in the laboratory practices. These different dimensions of the MGDP depict the difficulties that emerge between the probabilistic, relative and multiple constructions of population genomics and the rhetorical strategies to continually assert the existence of the unique “Mexican Genome”. I argue that the Mexican case study provides an entry point to what I and others (Benjamin 2009; Schwartz-Marin 2011) have identified as a postcolonial biopolitics in which the nation state is reasserted rather than diluted. However the relation between sovereignty, race and nation is not mediated by the biological purification of the nation (Agamben 1998; Foucault 2007), or the active participation of citizens looking to increase their vitality (Rose 2008, Rose & Rabinow 2006), but on an awareness of subalternity in the genomic arena and a collective desire to compete in the biomedical global economy.

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