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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.