ProfessorSonja Van Wichelen

Sonja's general research interests include postcolonial science studies, legal anthropology, and the sociology of globalization. A common thread throughout her work is seeing how "things" are made to circulate across borders and the role of institutions and publics in brokering these flows. Previous projects focused on cross-border reproductive technologies (including adoption and surrogacy), global migration, and transnational religion, and were spread over four fieldwork sites: the United States, the Netherlands, Indonesia, and Australia.

More recently, Sonja is focusing on three new areas that traverse the fields of science and technology studies and the anthropology of law. With her long-time collaborator, Marc de Leeuw, she is further developing the concept of biolegality, which examines the constitutive relation between biology and law in the formation of knowledge and sociality. Her second area of research is concerned with the changing forms of bioscience governance (including the circulation of its materials and information) in an era of "postgenomic" research. Sonja's third research foci brings questions of biolegality and bioscience governance to bear on North-South relations. Looking at Southeast Asia (and Indonesia in particular), she examines the postcolonial and regional politics of bioscientific exchange.