Paper short abstract:

This talk investigates how researchers in epigenetics and Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) currently (re)produce, perform and experiment with alternative imaginaries of biosociality.

Paper long abstract:

This talk investigates how researchers in epigenetics and Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) currently (re)produce and experiment with imaginaries of biosociality. Drawing from an empirical investigation of laboratory practices and contemporary scientific literature in these domains, we show how scientists perform an ideal of biosocial articulations between the biological instantiations of lifecourses and biographies on the one hand, and the socio-political modulation of biological predispositions on the other. From the construction of the organic inscription of contextual and/or experiential phenomena (e.g. methylation marks of stressful experiences or environmental exposures), to its reverberation into socio-political claims to protect one's epigenome for the benefit of future generations, we describe the fields of epigenetics and DOHaD as providing visible traces of the entanglements between social conditions and biological substrata, generating material instantiations of biosocial modulations anchored into imaginaries of social order.

Looking at the plurality of strategies scientists adopt to objectivise the biosociality of living forms in epigenetic and DOHaD research, we underline that several barriers can be found in the technoscientific repertoire of these biosciences for seizing biosocial hybridity. These constraints reverberate also in the imagination of moral and political strategies of intervention currently spreading out of epigenetic knowledge of health programming, with the resulting effect of giving evidence to distinct biosocial forms of ethopolitics; namely, by paraphrasing Rose (2007), the politics of how we should conduct our biography appropriately in relation to our biology, and vice versa.