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- Convenors:
-
Des Fitzgerald
Felicity Callard (University of Glasgow)
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- Format:
- Traditional Open Panel
Short Abstract
Here we invite papers that revisit debates on how STS should approach or interact with the biosciences within a 'biological age,' in light of recent political-economic developments in and beyond biology - in particular the cultural reanimation of biology as a determinant of reactionary politics.
Description
Some years ago, multiple scholars contributed to a claim that, as the world moved into a ‘biological age’ - i.e. as biosciences including genomics and neuroscience re-constituted concepts like selfhood, identify and collectivity – so STS needed to undertake a ‘biosocial’ turn to comprehend this transformation (Rose, 2013; Meloni, 2016). At the heart of this claim was the proposition that STS, as it interacted with the biosciences, was confronted with the task of breaking down barriers between cultural and biological knowledge, thus to constitute novel space across these newly open ‘postgenomic’ sciences. This was not uncontroversial: though the ‘biosocial’ perspective became broadly hegemonic, critics argued that these new theorizations represented rather a biological colonization of the social, a development that presaged a new reductionism and a new governmentality (Martin, 2012; Choudhury et al., 2015).
In this open panel, we invite reflection on these debates in light of recent political-economic developments in and beyond biology, and in particular the cultural reanimation of biology as a determinant of reactionary politics. Four non-exhaustive topoi illustrate these developments: (1) the re-emergence of a hardened science of biological sex, frequently backed by legislative fiat, within the global anti-gender movement; (2) the reinvigoration of ‘race science,’ as well as new interests in research on the link between 'intelligence’ and racialization; (3) the emergence of an expressly anti-migrant form of biological nationalism during the Covid-19 pandemic; (4) the politics of biosocial' knowledge practices at a time of increasing attacks on the humanities and social sciences.
Questions for the panel to address may include: How does (or should, or might) iosocial STS interact with the contemporary politics of biology? Is the biosocial a busted flush or is the concept recuperable? How does (or should, or might) the cultural work of nature change how scholars approach the concept of a natureculture?