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Short abstract:

In this presentation I argue that the biosociotechnical perspective can be useful to understand the change of bodies and properties status not only at the conceptual, theoretical or epistemological level but to the ontological and political in the context of reproductive biocapitalism

Long abstract:

STS field coined the concept of biocapitalism to explain how biological material has been subsumed in capitalist dynamics to be turn into products to be sold in the biotechnological industry (Rajan 2006; Helmreich 2008). In this context human bodies have become a space for capitalist accumulation. Such is the case of reproductive biocapitalism where biological human female bodies take part providing gametes, embryos and pregnancy to be commodified in this biotechnological capitalism (Cooper & Waldby 2014).

This phenomena has brought about not only a market nonexistent before but the construction of new relationships with the body. One of these is such where it would be possible to allow the disposal of the own body to drive it to its commoditization. This relationship is a new historical one compared to the one which capitalism established in their early days, where bodies couldn’t be considered properties given they were conceived as part of subjects out of the realm of objects and object relationships (Hoeyer 2013; Waldby & Cooper 2008).

I argue that the biosociotechnical can be useful to understand the change of bodies and properties status not only at the epistemological level but to the ontological and political too. The emergence of this new body relationship has been possible due to the articulation of biological knowledges about reproduction, social and political contexts making human reproduction a matter of concern but also a profit-driven space, and technological capacities that enable intervening the body and separating its parts along the mobilization of sociotechnical imaginaries.

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Short abstract:

I explore biosociotechnical ontologies of fat bodies, through developments in ‘hacking the microbiome’ and use of Ozempic. I argue that a dynamic ontology of fatness emerges, shaped through distinctive relationships with the social environment and technical intervention.

Long abstract:

Fat bodies are sites of entanglement between the biological and the social, where stigma and social inequality are bound in causal networks with physiological, metabolic, microbiotic, and epigenetic processes (Warin, 2015). Similarly, the biosociality of human-microbiome assemblages has been explored in terms of sensitivity to the social environment and the making of biosocial race (Benezra, 2020; Nieves Delgado & Baedke, 2021). In this talk I explore the biosociotechnical as a frame for understanding the ontologies of fat bodies, through the gut microbiome as a nexus where the biological, social, and technical meet.

The idea that the gut microbiome could be causally responsible for fatness has reached public consciousness. Technologies on the market now promise to optimise microbiome health, induce weight loss, and provide the ability to ‘hack your microbiome’. The gut microbiome also provides an avenue to probe shifting understandings of fatness in the ‘Ozempic era’, through the emerging knowledge of the interactions between the ‘miracle’ weight loss drug and gut microbiota. The patterns of use of these technologies are themselves scaffolded by social inequalities, anti-fatness, and changing landscapes of responsibility. Scientific and public understandings of ‘obesity’ and the microbiome seem to presuppose a static ontology of ‘fat’ microbiomes with fixed dispositions. However, upon closer examination, an ontology of fatness emerges as a dynamic human-microbiome community, shaped through and marked by distinctive relationships with the social environment and technical intervention.

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Short abstract:

I show how far-right communities intertwine politics of the environment with the body, employing biosociotechnical practices to shape bodies and generate new onto-epistemologies.

Long abstract:

The European far-right continue to occupy a significant (digital) presence across Europe. Most notable are their climate change conspiracy theories, often deemed as anti-scientific due to how they antagonize epistemic authorities. STS scholars have been put in a difficult position to guide hypermediated information cultures into new terrain. Yet, what is often overlooked are the far right’s more long-standing concerns for nature. Between conspiracy theories about Jews starting forest fires and the “modern soyscience” of “scientists who plan to block the sun”, some far-right communities offer ecological visions of the communal life while others call for accelerationism as the only sensible solution to addressing the point-source of the climate crisis.

As environmentally concerned social activists, what pervades their “onlife” practices concerns a politics of the environment as being at the same time a politics of the body. At the locus of scientific knowledge, digital infrastructures, and political concerns, I explore the biosociotechnical as a frame to understand how they ground socio-technical practices to make and do biological realities. From “dietary racism” to workout routines meant to escape a “gender dystopia” or abstinence from alcohol because “it’s been used as a tool to keep human consciousness at a lowered state for thousands of years”, I observe a highly ambivalent onto-ethico-epistemology, where the body is both static and fluid, loved *and* hated. The notion that the body is the locus of nefarious epigenetic forces shows a much broader conspiracy meta-theory: that the conspiracy not just in the social, but in the genes.

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Short abstract:

In this paper, I investigate how the vagueness and plurality of definitions related to who is categorized as a problem drinker is managed in and influenced by mHealth technology, e.g., apps for reducing harmful alcohol use.

Long abstract:

Given widespread mortality, morbidity and suffering related to alcohol consumption, research-based measures to intervene on problematic alcohol use are needed. What complicates the development of interventions is that in research, policymaking, as well as in lay parlance, there is no consensus about how to understand and identify problematic alcohol use (Saunders et al. 2018). What behaviors or which drinkers are labelled as problematic is influenced by societal norms related to, for instance, gender and class (Room 2006; John 2018). Moreover, it is noteworthy that the current diagnostic systems DSM and ICD have different categorizations, and a person might be diagnosed as suffering from an alcohol problem in one system and not in another (Saunders et al. 2018). In this paper, I investigate how this vagueness and plurality related to who is categorized as a problem drinker is managed in mHealth technology. I aim, first, to analyze the assumptions considering problematic alcohol use that underlie studies assessing the effectiveness of different mHealth technology interventions (e.g., Smaart app) to harmful use of alcohol, alcohol dependence, and alcohol use disorder. How do socially-laden norms related to ‘normal’ alcohol use influence how effectiveness in understood? Second, I ask how such apps mediate (Verbeek 2015) the relationship between a user and their experience of consuming alcohol. In particular, does mHealth have the potential to shape how ‘normal’ alcohol use is perceived?

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Short abstract:

I use the biosociotechnical framework to analyze how the distinction between Western and non-Western microbiomes is created. I show that bio-socio-technological entanglements generate a colonial norming space bringing racial and/or cultural stereotypes, among other discriminatory tropes to science.

Long abstract:

The distinction between what is considered part of the West or Western and what is non-Western is central in current human microbiome research. This distinction not only differentiates populations (Xu and Knight 2015), environments, lifestyles, diets, geographical regions (e.g. Gupta et al. 2017; Deering et al. 2020) and microbiome collectives (Vangay et al. 2018), but also generates a colonial norming space. In other words, West and non-Western, like other classification systems and dichotomies, describe and prescribe the populations labeled as such based on values inherited from allegedly extinct but alive colonial relations (Bowker and Star 2000; Anderson 2002).

In this presentation I argue that we can use the biosociotechnical to analyze the way scientists separate what counts as Western from what counts as non-Western. I conceptualized the biosociotechnical as a triangulation between the bio, the social and the technical that makes possible specific ways of differentiation. Diets, microbes, environments, health and disease, habits, lifestyles, geographical regions, ancestry estimations and microbial species identification, are defined and made relevant by technoscientific practices directing biological and anthropological knowledge involved in creating this knowledge. Given that Western biological and anthropological knowledge is a product of colonialism, this differentiation process is permeated by colonial values like racial hierarchies in the shape of new biosocial versions of race (Chellappoo and Baedke 2023) or archaic distinctions of culture as civilized and primitive and other inherited tropes (Benezra 2022). This conclusion calls into question international research focusing on Western and non-Western regions, the characterization of non-Western environments as pristine, non-Western microbiomes as healthier, and the non-Western lifestyles as less urbanized. More importantly, the coloniality of the West/non-West divide challenges the legitimacy of recruiting subjects of study in non-Western regions to improve global health.