Diagnostic liquidity: Mental illness and the global trade in DNA

Abstract

The increasing global circulation of information, capital, and human bodies operates in relation to regulatory techniques – at local, national, and transnational levels – that both encourage and constrain these flows. Studies of the creation and enactment of standards regimes provide helpful tools for the analysis of the practices involved in creating zones of potential circulation. This article combines an ethnographic description of the process of transnational standards-coordination with an analysis of the political contexts in which such commensuration practices unfold. It follows a particular set of transnational flows, involving human DNA, biomedical knowledge, and capital, whose direction is intimately related to the relative presence of regulatory and technical regimes within different national spaces.