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Political Biology
This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politicization of heredity: the peak of radical eugenics (1900-1945), characterized by an aggressive ethos of supporting the transformation of human society via biological knowledge; the repositioning, after 1945, of biological thinking into a liberal-democratic, human rights framework; and the present postgenomic crisis in which the genome can no longer be understood as insulated from environmental signals. In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.
The Politics of Potential
The first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its e...
Bergson and Freedom
This book provides the first full length treatment of the nature and function of freedom within the work of Henri Bergson. It does so while also introducing Bergson’s key ideas and major works. It explores Bergson through the lens of freedom, while at the same time showing how Bergson’s work might engage with current challenges. It does this by examining the four major works of Bergson, highlighting how freedom can be conceived in each text and how Bergson addresses key freedom problematics in those works. It offers a definition of freedom in Bergson as the “creation of the new within the flow of duration.” What emerges, is that freedom remains crucial for Bergson beyond the obvious treatment of freedom directly in Time and Free Will. Free will, memory, evolution, religion, and morality are major themes for Bergson. Moreover, there are particular freedom problematics concerning each of those themes that illustrate the central importance of freedom in Bergson. These include determinism, dualism, materialism, mechanism, finalism, and the notion of the open and closed.
Genetics and the Literary Imagination
Oxford Textual Perspectives is a series of informative and provocative studies focused upon literary texts (conceived of in the broadest sense of that term) and the technologies, cultures, and communities that produce, inform, and receive them. It provides fresh interpretations of fundamental works and of the vital and challenging issues emerging in English literary studies. By engaging with the materiality of the literary text, its production, and reception history, and frequently testing and exploring the boundaries of the notion of text itself, the volumes in the series question familiar frameworks and provide innovative interpretations of both canonical and less well-known works. This is...
The Handbook of DOHaD and Society
Research in the field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease has had a fundamental impact on our understanding of how environmental experiences and contexts influence the development of health and disease over the entire lifecourse. Covering a wide range of geographic regions, this volume includes an overview of the field, key concepts, and cutting-edge examples of interdisciplinary collaboration. The first reference text covering the interdisciplinary work of DOHaD, a broad list of contents maps the history of DOHaD, showcases examples of biosocial collaboration in action, offers a conceptual toolkit for interdisciplinary research, and maps future directions for the field. The definitive volume on biosocial collaborations in DOHaD, this will be indispensable for scholars working at the intersections of public health, lifecourse epidemiology and the social science of DOHaD. This title is also available as Open Access on Cambridge Core.
Integrative Approaches in Environmental Health and Exposome Research
Research on the relationship between health and the environment in a postgenomic context is increasingly aimed at understanding the various exposures as a whole, simultaneously taking into account data pertaining to the biology of organisms and the physical and social environment. Exposome research is a paradigmatic case of this new trend in environmental health studies. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach focusing on the conceptual, epistemological, and sociological reflections in the latest research on environmental and social determinants of health and disease. It offers a combination of theoretical and practical approaches and the authors are scholars from a multidisciplinary background (epidemiology, geography, philosophy of medicine and biology, sociology). Crucially, the book balances the benefit and cost of the integration of biological and social factors when modelling aetiology of disease.
Human Being and Vulnerability
Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner. In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence. Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.
Impressionable Biologies
During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity...
