Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, with an intro. and trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

This special issue of Science, Technology, & Human Values critically explores a new stage in which the life sciences and biomedical practices have entered. This new stage is marked by postgenomic developments and an increased interest of life sciences in the everyday lives of people outside laboratories and clinical settings. Furthermore, particular attention is given to many chronic and degenerative disorders such as cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s disease, or developmental disorders. These developments coincide—or have become entangled—with a new set of interests (...) that an anthropologically inclined science and technology studies is bringing to the analyses of biomedical practices. An increased interest is observed in the anthropologically inclined STS in studying phenomena on different scales and in exploring fields that are not readily dominated by technoscientific rationality in practice. The introduction to the special issue examines briefly these developments and situates them in a broader genealogy of different movements that have taken place in the anthropologically inclined subfield of STS since the late 1970s and early 1980s. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper examines the intertwined relations between eugenics and medical genetics from a Swedish perspective in the 1940s and 1950s. The Swedish case shows that a rudimentary form of genetic counseling emerged within eugenic practices in the applications of the Swedish Sterilization Act of 1941, here analyzed from the phenomenon of “heredophobia” (ärftlighetsskräck). At the same time genetic counseling also existed outside eugenic practices, within the discipline of medical genetics. The paper argues that a demand for genetic counseling increased in (...) the 1940s and 1950s in response to a sense of reproductive responsibility engendered by earlier eugenic discourse. The paper also questions the claim made by theoreticians of biopolitics that biological citizens have emerged only during the last decades, especially in neoliberal societies. From the Swedish case it is possible to argue that this had already happened earlier in relation to the proliferation of various aspects of eugenics to the public. (shrink)

In recent years, there has been an intense debate about the concept of “biological” or “genetic citizenship.” The growing literature on this topic mostly refers to the importance of patients’ associations, disease advocacy organizations, and self-help groups that are giving rise to new forms of subjectivation and collective action. The focus is on the extension of rights, the emergence of new possibilities of participation, and the choice-enhancing options of the new genetics. However, this perspective tends to neglect the potential for (...) exclusion and restriction of citizenship rights based on biological traits. We aim to broaden and complement the existing theoretical discussion on biological citizenship, which so far has concentrated on the medical sphere, by investigating a new empirical field. The article analyzes the use of DNA analysis for family reunification and shows that biological criteria still play an important role in decision making on citizenship rights in nation-states. Presenting Germany as an exemplary case, we argue that the use of parental testing endorses a biological concept of the family that is mobilized to diminish citizenship rights. The argument is based on documentary analysis and on interviews with representatives of nongovernmental organizations and immigration authorities, lawyers, geneticists, and applicants for family reunification. (shrink)

It is widely argued that the final decades of the twentieth century saw a fundamental change, marked by terms such as biomedicalization and geneticization, within the biomedical sciences. What unites these concepts is the assertion that a vast array of emerging technologies—in genomics, bioengineering, information technology, and so forth—are transforming understandings of disease, diagnosis, therapeutics, and working practices. While clearly important, these analyses have been accused of perpetuating theoretical trends that attribute primacy to the new over the old, discontinuity over (...) continuity, and the laboratory over the field. In this paper, I show that in the case of autism, the effects of genomic technologies can only be understood by simultaneously examining the role of questionnaires. Due to shortcomings in clinical diagnoses, genomic analyses could only progress once questionnaires had been developed to address a “reverse salient” within the “technological system.” Furthermore, I argue that questionnaires such as the Autism Quotient have a significance that surpasses the genomic classifications they were designed to undergird. I argue that to neglect the role of mundane technologies such as questionnaires in contemporary biomedicine is to miss complexity, bifurcate old and new, and do a disservice to innovation. (shrink)

Biobanking, the large-scale, systematic collection of data and tissue for open-ended research purposes, is on the rise, particularly in clinical research. The infrastructures for the systematic procurement, management and eventual use of human tissue and data are positioned between healthcare and research. However, the positioning of biobanking infrastructures and transfer of tissue and data between research and care is not an innocuous go-between. Instead, it involves changes in both domains and raises issues about how distinctions between research and care are (...) drawn and policed. Based on an analysis of the emergence and development of clinical biobanking in the Netherlands, this article explores how processes of bio-objectification associated with biobanking arise, redefining the ways in which distinctions between research and clinical care are governed. (shrink)

Research often characterized as “new materialist” has staged a return/turn to nature in social and critical theory by bringing “matter” into the purview of our research. While this growing impetus to take nature seriously fosters new types of interdisciplinarity and thus new resources for knowing our nature-cultural worlds, its capacity to deal with power’s imbrication in how we understand “nature” is curtailed by its failures to engage substantively with the epistemological interventions of postcolonial feminist science studies. The citational practices of (...) many new materialist thinkers eschew the existence of what Sandra Harding has called “a world of sciences.” I argue that the “science” privileged and often conflated with matter in new materialist storytelling is the same science destabilized by postcolonial feminist science studies. This does not mean that new materialist feminisms and postcolonial feminist science studies are necessarily at odds, as new materialist storytelling and prevailing conceptualizations of the postcolonial seem to suggest. On the contrary, I suggest that thinking creatively, capaciously, pluralistically, and thus irreverently with respect to the rules of science––about the boundaries and meanings of matter, “life,” and “humanness”––could be understood as a central project for a postcolonial feminist science studies. (shrink)

It is argued that neoliberal political ideology has redefined the regulatory state to have greater convergence of interests and goals with the pharmaceutical industry than previously, particularly regarding acceleration and cost reduction of drug development and regulatory review. Consequently, the pharmaceutical industry has been permitted to set the agenda about how shorter term and cheaper alternative carcinogenicity testing systems are investigated for validity. The authors contend that, with the tacit approval of the neoliberal regulatory state, the commercial interests of the (...) pharmaceutical industry framed the process and interpretation of validating these new test systems, thereby influencing what counts as knowledge about the carcinogenic status of new pharmaceuticals. While such alternative tests were occasioned by “molecularization,” the framing of their validation was not determined by technoscientific logic or a lack of standards of validation, but by the sociopolitical goals of the controlling institutions. Indeed, a different validation process could have been conducted had the priority been to develop carcinogenicity testing in the interests of public-health protection. While the resulting validation indicated that the short-term alternative tests posed small risks to the commercial interests of pharmaceutical firms, they provided little reassurance that patients would not be exposed to greater risks than before from undetected carcinogens. (shrink)

In many European countries, the explicit discussion of race as a biological phenomenon has long been avoided. This has not meant that race has become obsolete or irrelevant all together. Rather, it is a slippery object that keeps shifting and changing. To understand its slippery nature, we suggest that race in Europe is best viewed as an absent presence, something that oscillates between reality and nonreality, which appears on the surface and then hides underground. In this special issue, we explore (...) how race has been configured in different practices and how race-based identities and technologies are entwined in various European settings. (shrink)

Cardiovascular diseases present the leading cause of death worldwide. Over the last decade, their preventio has become not only a central medical and public health issue but also a matter of political concern as well as a major market for pharma, nutrition, and exercise. A preventive assemblage has formed that integrates diverse kinds of knowledges, technologies, and actors, from molecular biology to social work, to foster a specific healthy lifestyle. In this article, the authors analyze this preventive assemblage as a (...) heterogeneous engineer, that is, as an attempt to order complex everyday life into an architecture of modernism. This article draws on research conducted as part of the interdisciplinary research cluster ‘‘preventive self’’ bringing together analyses from social anthropology, history, linguistics, sociology of knowledge, and medicine. The authors report here primarily from ethnographic investigations into biomedical research, primary care, and educational practices in kindergartens. The authors conclude that the preventive assemblage largely fails to install any kind of singular order. Instead, it is translated into existing orderings producing heterogeneity of a different nuance. (shrink)

The public’s understanding of forensic DNA databases remains undertheorized and few empirical studies have been produced. This article aims to address this omission by exploring the answers to an open-ended question taken from an online questionnaire regarding the reasons for individuals’ voluntarily accepting or refusing to allow their DNA profile to be included in the Portuguese forensic DNA database. The analysis is undertaken from the perspective of biological citizenship and the simultaneous empowering and disempowering effects of surveillance. The results indicate (...) a pragmatic ethical framework that is linked to the cultural and emotional elements of altruism, resistance, stigma, and social representations of what is beneficial or harmful to the individual and to society. These subjectivities are anchored in commonplace images and metaphors for genetics, DNA, and forensic science that circulate in the messages transmitted by the media which pervade everyday life; hierarchies of trust in science and the justice system; and moral categories associated with the individual self-judgment in relation to crime, surveillance, and social order. (shrink)