Paul Rabinow's scholarly fascination with modernity and the human responses to it have congealed over 39 years into a discipline and approach which he terms the anthropology of reason - Anthropos + logos. He has centered on subjects which deal with modernity as a problem, whether it is individual historical figures seeking to cope and live with modernity's challenges and its diverse forms or individuals and institutions seeking to advance or resist modern projects of power and knowledge. His scholarship since 1970 has touched on subjects as diverse as Moroccan saints challenged by colonial and post-colonial regimes, to social planning in France and, most recently, molecular biology and genomics. He is currently working on creating an analytical framework to understand and define the issues of bio-politics and bio-security. In other words, his work delves far deeper and goes far beyond the Bay Area controversy about stem-cell research and local scientific facilities. His research encompasses a terrain on the vast horizon of human and technological experimentation, which, according to some, is the definition of modernity.
Paul Rabinow's scholarly fascination with modernity and the human responses to it have congealed over 39 years into a discipline and approach which he terms the anthropology of reason - Anthropos + logos. He has centered on subjects which deal with modernity as a problem, whether it is individual historical figures seeking to cope and live with modernity's challenges and its diverse forms or individuals and institutions seeking to advance or resist modern projects of power and knowledge. His scholarship since 1970 has touched on subjects as diverse as Moroccan saints challenged by colonial and post-colonial regimes, to social planning in France and, most recently, molecular biology and genomics. He is currently working on creating an analytical framework to understand and define the issues of bio-politics and bio-security. In other words, his work delves far deeper and goes far beyond the Bay Area controversy about stem-cell research and local scientific facilities. His research encompasses a terrain on the vast horizon of human and technological experimentation, which, according to some, is the definition of modernity.