HOUGHTON, MI--Laurie Anne Whitt, associate professor of philosophy in the Humanities Department at Michigan Tech, was recently awarded a $20,000 Howard Foundation fellowship for her research project, "Biocolonialism and Indigenous Peoples."
The George A. and Eliza Gardner Howard Foundation, administered by Brown University, chose 11 fellowship recipients representing the fields of anthropology, philosophy, and sociology. Recipients were selected from among 167 scholars by the Foundations Board of Administration, including the President and the Dean of the Graduate School at Brown University.
Whitt explained that her fellowship project is interdisciplinary, lying at the intersection of three different fields: science studies, legal studies, and indigenous studies.
"It is difficult to get funding for this type of interdisciplinary work, so I was surprised and delighted at the Howard Foundations willingness to support it," Whitt said. "I am grateful for their encouragement." Next year, Whitt will be a Visiting Scholar at the Law School of the University of Notre Dame, and its center for Civil and Human Rights. There, she will work on a book manuscript that critiques the practice of extractive biocolonialism.
"Biocolonialism is the product of an alliance forged by the biotechnology industry with the dominant legal system," Whitt explained. "In extractive biocolonialism, the knowledge and genetic resources of indigenous peoples are appropriated, legally converted into the private intellectual property of those who have appropriated it, transformed into commodities, and sold."
According to Whitt, indigenous peoples enjoy none of the benefits of this process, and bear all of its burdens. The impacts are diverse and include: destruction of the environment and the way of life it sustains; destabilization of indigenous social, economic, and legal structures; the disruption of indigenous knowledge and value systems; the intensification of political struggles; and assimilation and loss of biological and cultural diversity.
"The recent controversy over the Human Genome Diversity Project, and the commodification of the cell-lines of indigenous peoples, is the latest phase of this," Whitt added.
"My book will attempt to clarify the nature of biocolonialism, to bring together diverse indigenous critiques of it, and to undermine its continuation."
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