Abstract
This chapter conceptualizes risk media as a set of technologies, discourses, and practices that shape the definition, regulation, and perception of risk problems. The chapter explores the role of biopatents in the production of new forms of vitality and biojuridical subjectivity, focusing on an infringement lawsuit filed by Monsanto against a Canadian farmer for violating its patent rights to genes that confer herbicide resistance to canola crops. The chapter analyzes five modes of mediating risk in legal and popular discourses surrounding the Schmeiser case as it moved through all three levels of the Canadian legal system. Initially, patents and other risk media reinforced dominant economic structures, modes of perception, and cultural practices that support the biotech industry and its narrow definition of biotechnological risk as events that have the potential to interfere with investment in and exploitation of genetic inventions. However, the Schmeiser case also received ongoing coverage in Canadian and international news media, which popularized Schmeiser’s much broader definition of biotechnological risk in terms of epistemological uncertainty and ontological insecurity provoked by biopatents in agriculture and their potential impact on body boundaries, the cultural practices of farmers, and the value of local knowledge.
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