Biosocieties最新文献

This article examines environmental narratives amidst chronic industrial pollution across three generations in Taranto, Italy. Drawing on ethnographic research with residents positioned in different historical periods, we show how each generation's understanding of toxicity is intimately tied to shifting economic conditions, political interventions, and embodied experiences in Taranto's polluted landscape. The first generation, closely tied to state-led industrial development, recalls their experience of pride and modernity. The second generation is faced with growing scientific evidence on industrial pollution and institutional scrutiny: they make sense of toxicity by questioning the promise of prosperity that the industrial development and resulting modernity offered. The youngest generation, who grew amid persistent environmental degradation, creates a narrative of pollution as a given dimension of everyday life and one that calls forth community cohesion. By highlighting these intergenerational narratives and their ongoing renegotiations, we shed light on how wellbeing and care are assembled, reworked, and contested over time. In doing so, this paper contributes to more heterogeneous understandings of environmental justice and the ways communities live through, and make sense of, industrial harm.

The relative expansion of biosocial research within the life sciences has generated substantial interest from social sciences, with epigenetic science and scientists the primary target of critical commentary. This has led to a narrow perspective on what the biosocial is and how it is being (re)constituted within scientific research, highlighting a need to engage diverse publics in this unfolding terrain of knowledge making. Whilst birth cohorts are often a central resource and primary context for emerging fields of biosocial and epigenetic research, how cohort participants perceive and understand 'biosocial' interactions in the context of their lifelong and intergenerational participation is less well known. Drawing on pilot study research with birth cohort participants in the UK and Brazil, we comparatively examine how, in the absence of explicit references to a biosocial exemplar of epigenetics, biosocial dynamics are nonetheless understood by participants in relation to (i) embodied experiences, (ii) intergenerational participation, and (iii) understandings of the knowledge the studies aim to produce. Attending to different understandings of biological and social dynamics in diverse publics helps diversify and broaden the conceptual and methodological tools used to engage in and understand what the biosocial is and how it is coming into being.

Attending to competing styles of thought in healthcare controversies may be helpful to critical health scholarship. This article reexamines the debate over the introduction of a new HIV prevention technology in England as a tension between epidemiological and molecular style of thoughts. I argue English HIV services were organised according to an epidemiological style of thought. The introduction of biomedical pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) to the health system brought this rationality into question in ways the English health system was ill-prepared to manage. A situational analysis of English PrEP discourse in the lead up and following NHS-England's 'U-turn' on PrEP illustrates a split along epidemiologically and biomedically informed styles of thought. These networks have their dedicated administrators, experts, activists and ways of thinking about their target population and preferred organisation of HIV services. Though they often collaborate, these two groups have distinct moral and political agendas that relate to their style of thinking. This analysis further nuances existing critical interpretations of the PrEP controversy in England. Beyond England, this debate suggests a potential departure from the conventional biopolitical subject and rationality of advanced liberalism.

DIY biology, or Do-It-Yourself biology, refers to a movement where individuals and communities establish laboratories outside traditional academic and industrial settings-such as in garages, kitchens, or community spaces. DIY biologists experiment with gene-editing technologies like CRISPR, cultivate glow-in-the-dark plants, and engineering colorful fungi. This practice challenges established norms in research, advocating for decentralized and community-driven approaches to scientific inquiry and innovation. DIY biologists are often trained scientists who choose to conduct their research in community or home laboratories. The DIY biology movement highlights that science's boundaries are flexible and sometimes ambiguous (Gieryn in Am Sociol Rev 48:781-795, 1983). By operating outside traditional research institutions, DIY biologists challenge established authority, hierarchies, funding structures, and proprietary regimes. They create a distinct identity beyond the increasingly neoliberalized institutional spheres of modern knowledge production, showcasing alternative ways to pursue science. I theorize DIY biology as 'extra-institutional science' due to its emergence outside conventional laboratories of industry and academia. This research draws on empirical data from interviews with DIY biologists and the 2021 DIY Biology Community Survey.

This article examines the potentials and limitations of the concept of "chemosociality" (Shapiro and Kirksey, Cultural Anthropology 32:481-493, 2017) through a case study of Emerald, an environmental NGO addressing pollution in China's chemical industry. Based on fieldwork and online research conducted since 2016, the article explores how chemosociality provides a lens to move beyond binary views of a homogeneous frontline community battling against toxic industries. However, it argues that chemosociality alone is insufficient to account for the unevenness of community engagement in environmental advocacy. Drawing on Bradley's concept of biosolidarity (Bradley, Anthropology & Medicine 28:543-557, 2021), the article introduces chemosolidarity and ecosolidarity to highlight Emerald's efforts to foster public participation. While Emerald's attempts to cultivate chemosolidarity were unsuccessful, they nurtured ecosolidarity, grounded in a shared appreciation of nature. This example underscores the need to differentiate between sociality and solidarity and to pay attention to affective rather than effective participation to gain a more nuanced understanding of environmental justice and the complexities of toxicity and environmental advocacy.

The sciences of environmental epigenetics and the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease have become central in efforts to understand how early life experiences impact health across the life course. This paper draws on interviews with epigenetic scientists and laboratory observations in the United States and Canada to show how scientists conceptualize epigenetic biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life and the consequences this has for postgenomic approaches to health, risk, and intervention. We argue that this process demarcates early life as the optimal time to study and intervene in health and positions biomarkers as conceptual and methodological tools that scientists mobilize to reimagine early life environments. These environments include Positive Childhood Experiences (PCEs), which reflect an emergent and increasingly prominent epistemic object in behavioral epigenetics. Though distinct from widespread research on Early Life Adversity, we show how PCEs continue to essentialize experience in gendered and individualized ways. Further, this paper suggests that focusing on biomarkers as molecular vestiges of early life allows scientists to create stability despite ongoing epistemological and biological unknowns in epigenetics and DOHaD. Our findings contribute new perspectives to social studies of epigenetics, biomarkers, and the production of novel epistemic objects in postgenomic knowledge practices.

The article brings together two disparate and so far largely disconnected bodies of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies and the debate on modes of anticipation. It starts with a short review of the state of the research on the concept of cryopolitics. In the next part I will suggest two revisions. I will problematize the idea of latent life and the focus on potentialities that have been central to the research on cryopolitics so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to suspended life on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.

Following recent discussions around suspended life, this paper focuses on an endeavor that sought to arrest biological material in time and space and render it available on demand. It depicts the attempt to establish a collection of cryopreserved donated cells. The study offers rare insights into how this initiative was at odds with familiar politics significant in its field, those of innovation and preparedness, and therefore was suspended itself. In identifying parallels with accounts of unsuccessful biobanks, the paper makes a case for the analytical value of considering ill-fated projects of suspension along with those that prosper and attract public attention. The case of a novel cryo-collection, in particular, demonstrates how the idea and practice of suspension only gathers political momentum when it serves other well-established rationales. As such, it prompts two important conclusions. First, the power to arrest life as it comes with cryotechnologies is much more likely to unravel in entrenched constellations than to carry transformative or disruptive potential. Second, however, the paper also exemplifies that projects of suspension are not necessarily doomed to serve hegemonic ways of governing life. It advocates for preventing such mismatches from falling into oblivion.

This article investigates 20 years of discursive struggles in Nordic medical journals around the process of legitimating and routinising gestational surrogacy and uterus transplantation in Finland and Sweden. The comparative analysis through critical discourse analysis suggests that influential health care professionals have contributed to different levels of legal and cultural adaptation of the methods, prioritising non-commercial gestational surrogacy in Finland and uterus transplantation in Sweden. The article identifies central discursive turning points in the medical journal discussions by interpreting them against the background of medical and policy developments in Finland and Sweden during the analysed twenty-year period. Legitimation and routinisation of surrogacy and uterus transplantation were developed through biomedicalisation by representing them as infertility treatments and emphasising the relational dynamics between donors and recipients—a connection that in the Nordic context is often based on kinship or close relationships. The diagnosis of absolute uterine factor infertility was central to representing women as on the boundary between fertile and infertile, as they may have functioning ovaries. Through the biomedicalised rhetoric of equal opportunities for biogenetic motherhood, the diagnosed women’s ambiguous reproductive status was used to legitimise the two methods as cures for absolute infertility, thereby reinforcing hegemonic family and kinship norms.

This article analyses how people who identify with psychiatric diagnoses in England and Wales make sense of and talk about their experiences of sexual violence. I examine how interview participants engaged with the hegemonic trauma discourse, as well as the consequences of this for meaning-making, affective pain, and the feminist imperative to ‘speak out’. The hegemonic trauma discourse is characterised by leaving a psychological ‘scar’; is premised on a sudden interruption to a ‘good life’; and is considered pathologically unspeakable without intervention. This discourse was both validating and affectively painful for participants, and interventions targeting dissociation were helpful for assuaging distress. However, it was additionally normative and exclusionary, and did not fulfil the political promise of ‘speaking out’, as all participants faced myriad socio-political denial.