New developments in life science and information science invite rigorous inquiries into what we mean by - and ascribe to - 'life'. "Artificial Life" provides a summary of the key technical and legal developments and an account of why these developments are so unsettling to established categories like 'human', 'technology', and 'nature'. In five chapters - that discuss spaces of life; theories of life; the industrialization of life; spaces of property; and new imaginaries - "Artificial Life": explains how research in biology and informational technology questions the division between human and animal, human and machine, bodies and data, cells and information; provides an account vitalist and bio-philosophical thinking from Whitehead to Deleuze; and elucidates a new set of ideas and methods focused on complexity and emergence. "Artificial Life" outlines the principal themes with economy and directness; while the focus is on issues of active social concern - like stem cells research - which have stimulated theoretical and methodological developments in the humanities and social sciences.

Author Biography

Nigel Thrift is Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Bristol. He has co-edited and co-authored numerous books; most recently Writing the Rural: Five Cultural Geographies and Globalisation, Institutions and Regional Development in Europe. Thrift has three co-edited or co-authored books in press The City of London and Social Power in Modern Britain; Diffusing Geography: Essays for Peter Hagget; and Mapping the Subject. Sarah is a graduate of University College London where she gained a BA (Geography) in 1981; an M.Phil. (Town Planning) in 1983 and, after a stint working for the Greater London Council, a PhD (Geography) in 1988. She spent 12 years teaching in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol, where she was promoted to a Chair in Human Geography in 1999 and awarded a DSc for published research in 2000. She moved to the Geography Discipline at the Open University in September 2001 as Professor of Environmental Geography. Sarah has also held visiting appointments in several institutions overseas including the University of California, Santa Cruz and the University of Wisconsin, Madison (USA); the University of Newcastle, (Australia); and the University of Trondheim (Norway). A Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) for nearly 20 years, Sarah was elected to the Council of the RGS/IBG and to membership of the Research Committee in June 2004 for 3 years. She is also an elected member of the Academy of Learned Societies in the Social Sciences and a Fellow of the RSA (Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce). She is currently an editor of Environment and Planning, A (Pion) and of the Blackwell Dictionary of Human Geography (5th edition), and serves on the editorial boards of several journals. Her research focuses on relations between people and the material world, particularly the living world, and the spatial habits of thought that inform the ways in which these relations are imagined and practiced in the conduct of science, governance and everyday life. She has published widely on the theoretical and political implications of these questions in two main directions.