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CP481


Navigating biosociotechnical complexities: five case studies in making and doing the body. 
Convenors:
Shahin Nazar kermanshahi (Utrecht University)
Abigail Nieves Delgado (Utrecht University)
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Discussant:
Shahin Nazar kermanshahi (Utrecht University)
Format:
Closed Panel
Location:
HG-07A32
Sessions:
Tuesday 16 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Amsterdam

Short Abstract:

In this panel we introduce the biosociotechnical as a way to analyze how technology gives directionality to a multitude of interactions between the biological and the social in shaping the body. We offer five case studies to explore its onto-epistemic workings.

Long Abstract:

The biosocial framework helps us understand the mutually constitutive entanglement of the social and the biological. Epigenetics and microbiome research, situated within this onto-epistemology, highlight how social factors like lifestyle, physical activity, diets, antibiotic usage, hygiene and unequal social conditions make and do the body (Chellappoo and Baedke 2023; Meloni et al. 2022; Niewöhner 2011). For instance, it has been argued that health disparities in cardiovascular disease between white and nonwhite Americans are brought about by epigenetic mechanisms, or indeed embodied racialized environments (Martin et al. 2022). However, the biosocial framework does not account for the technological dimension of making and doing our biological and social realities.

We see technology as mediating a multitude of interactions between the biological and the social in shaping the body. From far-right groups using social media as a tool to sustain, motivate, and organize their racial politics through practices of ‘dietary racism’ to apps that script users to generate new sociotechnical habits to recover from alcohol abuse or technologies regulating, commodifying and gendering reproduction. We call this the biosociotechnical and it allows us to grasp the complex entanglement between the social, the biological, and the technical made possible by digital infrastructures like social media and technologies used in doing technoscience. It seeks to address this by integrating technology in making and doing the biosocial, in rethinking how technology gives directionality to a multitude of interactions between the biological and the social in shaping the body. How does the biosociotechnical actively partake in making and doing the panoply of racialized and gendered practices that might be embodied, and the epistemological normative spaces where technoscientific objects are produced? We answer these questions by looking at the onto-epistemic workings of this concept through presenting five case studies that put the biosociotechnical to test.

Accepted papers:

Session 1 Tuesday 16 July, 2024, -