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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?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
In this paper, I reflect on debates about the 'biosocial' from the mid 2000s, in light of the reanimated relationship between fascism and biology that has since emerged.
Paper long abstract
In the mid 2000s, a set of heated debates took place around the role of interdisciplinarity in STS and adjacent fields. In particular, debate centered on how those fields could (or should) learn to cultivate new forms of engagement in, or entanglement with, the biosciences – a set of fields, buoyed by new genomic and neurobiological techniques, making novel claims of their own to speak of, to, with and through ‘the social.’ Some scholars in this period diagnosed a new ‘biosocial landscape,' offering new avenues for interdisciplinary experiment between the biosciences and nearby social science and humanities fields, such as STS or the medical humanities (Rose, 2013; Meloni, 2016; Callard and Fitzgerald, 2016). For others, what was happening was something more like a biological colonization of the social, a troubling development that presaged a new reductionism scientifically, and a new governmentalizing force politically (Choudhury et al., 2015; Young, 2012; Gillies, Edwards and Horsley, 2016). In this contribution, situating myself as someone who participated enthusiastically on one side of them, I want to reflect on these debates from the perspective of a decade or so later. In particular I want to ask whether the broadly anti-biology and anti-interdisciplinary arguments that were then advanced, which were perhaps less potent at the time, or which at least seemed untimely with regard to the demands of the day (indeed, such were claims that I myself made at the time), are not, in fact, worth revisiting in the light of recent political developments.
Paper short abstract
This paper analyses the ‘biosocial’ in our current conjuncture in which distinctive models of biology and psychology are deployed in the service of radical sociopolitical projects of the right. It addresses specifically the current lure of cisness as that which insists on sex as biological fact.
Paper long abstract
One re-animation of biology in our time of reactionary and fascist politics is the allure of the phrase ‘biological sex’. There are numerous attempts to nail down sex as biological fact through legislative judgements, policy interventions, and the work of right-wing social movements. In the United Kingdom, for example, the government-commissioned independent Sullivan Review on data, statistics and research on sex and gender (re)installs ideologically driven models of ‘biological’ sex as well as a hygienically maintained separation between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ that casts ‘biology’ as ‘material reality’ in distinction to the sphere of psychological self-understanding to which ‘gender identity’ is relegated (Todd and Callard 2026). What are we to make of the category of the ‘biosocial’ as distinctive models of biology and of psychology are hardening in the service of radical sociopolitical projects of the right? I pursue this question by taking up arguments made by feminist and trans scholars about ‘cisness’. If cisness has been named by Heaney (2026) as the concept which ‘recasts sex as a biological fact following political challenges to the sanctity of sex as an ordained social order’, its lure for right-wing politics, in the current late-capitalist conjuncture, cannot disguise that category’s ever-intensifying (biosocial) contradictions (Wallenhorst, 2026). The paper considers whether the category of the biosocial is able, today, in the face of counter-revolutionary projects, to help crack sex open or whether we ought, instead, to consider it as a kind of out-of-joint artefact of the early twenty-first century.
Paper short abstract
Barbara McClintock’s affectively-charged research is a ‘founding parable’ of feminist STS, representing a way of doing science differently. This paper interrogates the significance of recent retellings of this parable, wherein affect is not seen as marginal but integral to scientific practice.
Paper long abstract
Evelyn Fox Keller’s biography of Barbara McClintock, A Feeling for the Organism, has become a foundational text within and beyond feminist STS. In particular, Keller’s argument—that it was through attentiveness, affectivity, and intimacy with her research material that McClintock was able to produce ground breaking research—became central to feminist critique. In this paper, we interrogate recent retellings of this parable, wherein affect is seen not as marginal but integral to scientific research, and increasingly used to justify existing practice and the status quo. We proceed in four steps. First, we establish a feeling for the organism as a key parable in STS. Second, We discuss Keller’s analysis of McClintock, within which the cytogeneticist is understood as epistemically distinct from her colleagues. Third, we detail the ‘Stengers-Despret shibboleth’: a high-profile body of scholarship that took up McClintock’s work in order to evidence that it is possible to do science differently (and ethically). Finally, we examine a contemporary body of work that understands McClintock’s affectively-charged approach as socially and historically normal. We argue that this contemporary deployment of McClintock re-asserts the ethical radicality of this parable (affectively-charged science is good science) whilst making a quite different epistemological argument (McClintock was not unusual; much of science is affectively charged). We conclude by arguing that this reading of McClintock is ill-equipped for dealing with the bioscience in an age of increasingly biological fascism and argue for a re-reading that once again challenges scientists to do things differently.
Paper short abstract
Defining a biosocial perspective on the relationship between the genetic and the social has long engaged epistemological and philosophical debate. Yet the outcome of this debate has been the result of power: economic, biopolitical and discursive -- an essential field of action for STS scholars.
Paper long abstract
While the question of developing a biosocial perspective on the relationship between the genetic and the social is an epistemological one, having led to political-scientific debates dating back to the heyday of eugenics (Meloni, 2016; Tabery, 2008, 2023), the outcome of these debates in scientific practice has NOT been the result of philosophical considerations but of power: economic, political and discursive. I point to epistemological and interdisciplinary collaboration between microeconomic conceptions of ‘human capital’ and the research questions pursued by social genomics (and not only), as well as to current healthcare policies and infrastructures repeatedly validating the notion of a genetic substrate that precedes and defines our social existence. This social existence is typically reduced to the variables of interest for optimising the governance of labour-power and ‘inactive’ populations in a capitalism in a constant state of ‘crisis’—a crisis that has been managed by sorting, hierachising and racialising populations for different sorts of ‘treatment’. This is an operation that is in continual dialogue with the scientific discourses and technological ‘innovations’ that serve such hierarchical categorisations, as well as with the bio-industries that profit from these. Given this context, as STS scholars, we ought to engage, as a priority, with political action to challenge these developments in civil society and with campaigns to promote critical public literacy that questions the authoritative dominance of these conceptualisations and applications of ‘biosocial’ research.
Paper short abstract
This paper will attempt an explanation of how/why the biosocial turn did not succeed in burying biological determinism through an account of 'data' and 'computation' as historical emergence. I ask how 'the real' has been operationalised towards a new style of totalitarian science.
Paper long abstract
In 2013 Nikolas Rose said: “We need no reminder of the dispiriting and often murderous ways in which genetic explanations have entered human history. But things have changed.”
In this paper, I humbly suggest Rose might have been righter than he knew. Whilst genetic science was changing, so too were the techniques that render scientific discourse real in society. Rose remarked that determinist genetics was scuppered by ‘the real itself’, and that a new style of thought was emerging that turned away from determinism and embraced the complex, emergent and productive paradox of eteology.
But why should determinism not return? The production of visibility is a social achievement and I wonder whether we did not place too much faith in ‘the real’ to intervene on our behalf? Calls to reality no longer seem to unsettle reactionary accounts of life, increasingly they reaffirm old inductive components of the deterministic universe: race, sex, genetic intelligence, &c. It is no accident that the gender-critical movement calls to ‘the reality of biological sex’, that artificial intelligence relies on reductive accounts of ‘real’ intelligence.
Thus, the argument presented in this paper is that biology, and more importantly the real itself, has been mobilised towards a new scientism. Whilst scientists (social, biological, and otherwise) may find epistemic agreement vis-à-vis the fleshy reality of life, a new science of data has found novel ways to operationalise the ‘nature’ of things. To understand contemporary deterministic fascism, I suggest we start by asking what kind of things are data?
Paper short abstract
The paper examines biosocial collaborations amid returning quests for ‘hardened’ biological knowledge on gender/sex. Drawing on ethnography, it traces the molecularization of gender/sex and demonstrates the ambivalences and contestations of gender/sex knowledge between the bio and the social.
Paper long abstract
Against the backdrop of the re-emergence of ‘hardened’ biological knowledge about gender/sex this contribution explores the ambivalent ‘colonialization’ of the social through biology. For this I analyze ethnographic observation protocols and interviews from an interdisciplinary collaboration on gender/sex between bio and social sciences.
Through this analysis, firstly, a progressive ‘molecularization’ (Rose 2011, Peters 2021) of gender/sex can be observed in biomedicine: gender/sex is increasingly referred to genetic, hormonal, and cellular markers in order to define it precisely, operationalize it, and clinically contain it. At the same time, the integration of the gender category expands the scope of responsibility of biomedical research. Paradoxically, however, in this it remains dependent on expertise from the humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies, as central conceptual, epistemic, and political debates about gender/sex are embedded in these disciplines.
Secondly, this expansion onto gender/sex in bio-medicine is fraught with ambivalence: disciplinary divisions of knowledge (practices) along the lines of sex vs. gender are enacted as well as contradicted; they function momentarily as re-essentializations of a ‘biological sex’ and then again as deconstructions of the gender/sex binary.
With this the contribution examines practices of a bio-social collaboration on gender/sex within the context of current – including reactionary – shifts in the ‘biological age’. Rather than observing a convergence of biosocial considerations into reactionary politics, I trace a conflictual terrain between ‘hardened’ binary gender/sex conceptualizations and their reconfigurations along notions of diversity and processuality – a terrain on which the contemporary politics of biology are actively negotiated and reconfigured.
Paper short abstract
Through a feminist lens, this work examines maternal-fetal epigenetic research, highlighting how studies of prenatal influences inform health outcomes yet risk reinforcing social biases, and calls for revised methodological and conceptual approaches.
Paper long abstract
The emerging field of epigenetics explains that environmental influences, such as pollution, nutrition, and trauma, can lead to alterations in gene expression. Though much of this research has surrounded environmental impacts on health, there is an increased interest in investigating epigenetic effects on fetal development, asking questions surrounding whether maternal care heavily impacts the outcome of offspring health. These studies, while impactful, are socially and politically contentious, raising questions of race, class, and gender. By framing fetal development as a direct effect of maternal health, the maternal body becomes the environment, prompting reflection on embodiment and ideas of the “good” or “bad” mother. This piece draws upon my experience as a feminist scientist working on the largest study of maternal-fetal epigenetic connections in the United States, the HEALthy Brain and Child Development Study. I draw upon a range of epigenetic studies to demonstrate how the production of scientific knowledge not only generates empirical findings but also reinforces harmful assumptions about race, class, gender, and other social categories. Ultimately, I propose feminist science as a critical framework for advancing a new paradigm, one that recognizes the insights offered by studies like HBCD while also interrogating how they may perpetuate existing flaws under the guise of traditional scientific objectivity. Maternal-fetal epigenetic research has significant potential to expand our understanding of the long-term impacts of prenatal exposures on health and disease. However, to fully harness this emerging knowledge, we must reimagine the conceptual and methodological frameworks through which we interpret and apply it.
Paper short abstract
The presentation analyses the emergence of a new normativity on sleep based on a biologized model that considers itself biosocial. To this end, we draw on radio and television reports broadcast in Uruguay between 2014 and 2024, in which experts comment on sleep problems and ways of addressing them.
Paper long abstract
Academic and media discourse on good or bad sleep and healthy sleeping habits is commonly dominated by sleep medicine and chronobiology. In countries as diverse as the United States and Argentina, public policy decisions such as high school start times have been modified based on chronobiology recommendations demonstrating how biologized notions of sleep are influencing concrete policies that regulate how people sleep.
In this presentation, we will discuss the emergence of a new normativity on sleep based on a biologized model of sleep that considers itself biosocial. To this end, we will draw on radio and television reports broadcast in Uruguay between 2014 and 2024, in which doctors and academics comment on sleep problems and ways of addressing them. In these reports Uruguayans are portrayed as nocturnal creatures who eat and go to bed much later than other populations in the region and these habits are considered to have a negative impact on how much sleep they get each night. According to experts, this situation is exacerbated among children and adolescents, whose school performance declines as a result.
We argue that this characterisation incorporates social and cultural dimensions only to the extent that they reinforce the biomedical view of sleep and allow habits to be censored in pursuit of biological optimization. We also discuss how this biosocial view of sleep becomes a new form of habit regulation, inciting us to monitor our own and others' sleep, and even calling for public policies to be created.