Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the configuration of biosocial entities in the fields of social and environmental epigenetics. Based on fieldwork data from Glasgow we advance the notion of localised biology as a further analytical tool for describing the cultural and political situatedness of epigenetics.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores how biosocial entities are configured within the emerging fields of social and environmental epigenetics. Starting from a study on the association of epigenetic markers with socio-economic status among Glaswegian communities (McGuinness et al. 2012), we conducted an observational study and in-depth (semi-structured) interviews with members of the interdisciplinary team involved in this project. Based on our fieldwork data, we defined the existence of a community-level problem in Glasgow, which is above all of social and political character, as the driving engine for scholarly co-laboration (Niewöhner 2015) around epigenetics. The concept of local biologies (Lock 2015; Niewöhner 2015) has already been used to describe how epigenetics has been taken up in the investigation of social and cultural practices. According to Niewöhner, epigenetics is localizing biology in the sense of bringing different levels of context into the experimental toolbox of biomedicine, as well as opening up its epistemic repertoire to cultural investigations from the epistemic categories of social and political sciences. Here, we engage with the concepts of 'local biology' and 'localising biology', and use the Glasgow case to propose a distinct notion of localised biology as an additional analytical tool for describing how epigenetics is mobilized as an epistemic tool to address complex socio-political matters. Rather than pointing to a shift in the ontologies of disciplinary identities prompted by epigenetics (Niewöhner 2015), we show that it is the context of Glasgow - with its stark health inequalities and political struggles - that shapes distinct uses of epigenetics across disciplinary boundaries.