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Accepted Paper
Paper long abstract
The arrival of big genome data stimulated a fascination with genomic predictions. DNA phenotyping - the prediction of observable traits from the genome, Genome Wide Association Studies and Polygenic (Risk) Scores define research agendas in biology and medicine, but also foster links to psychology and sociology. The emerging field of behavioural genetics and its uptake in criminology, I argue, is one such link that adds new qualities to sociological analyses of Nikolas Rose’s ‘somatic society’ or Ian Hacking’s ‘human kinds’. In extension of these and critical studies on phenotyping I offer an analysis of what I term ‘dis/ordering bodies’.
Biosocial Criminology has long argued that there is a bodily substance to crime - an argument that has been shaped by the discipline’s relationship to pathology. Big genome data offers means to think that relationship anew. Situated at the intersection of psychology, medicine and criminology the ‘antisocial phenotype’ emerges as an analytic focus. It connects genetic analyses of mental disorders to issues of crime and disorderly behaviour. Based on a systematic literature study of over 700 research papers and expert interviews I trace how this relationship is crafted, where the relationship between order and disorder is articulated in several ways. The aesthetic rationalism of big genome data methods is one such articulation of order: computation establishes analytic distance from the messy bodies and their messy behaviour. At the same time, it also assumes the scientific authority to re-inscribe orderliness and disorderliness into bodies at the molecular level.
Encoded Bodies: Biometric Medicine and the Surveillance of Human Life
Session 1