Making Biofutures: Anticipating the futures of biomedicine, healthcare, and life itself

Session Submission Type: Traditional (Closed) Panel

Abstract

Life is being (re-)imagined and remade in biomedicine. Future-oriented visions of hope, hype, and fear are animating the emergence new bioeconomies: novel biological entities are being created and circulated, subjectivities and identities are being fashioned, and regulatory structures are being reconfigured. These envisaged futures may relate to national wealth-building aspirations such as those associated with regenerative and precision medicine. They may relate to the fear of emerging bio threats such as anti-microbial resistance. Or, as the case of cross-border reproductive care and healthcare tourism, they may relate to the more local, private aspirations of individuals and families.

This panel will bring together leading scholars from STS, sociology, and anthropology to explore how discourses and narratives of promise, hope, expectation and fear are shaping biotechnology and biomedicine, and thus how particular futures are being constructed in the process. The Biofutures Panel will explore how human health and the production of human life are being transformed with these developments, and address related ethical and public policy questions. Ultimately, the aim of this panel is to reflect on the futures that are likely to materialise, to anticipate the potential tensions and opportunities within these futures, and thus to address the questions: what futures do we want? And, importantly, how can STS contribute to the construction of inclusive futures that align with the values of wider publics?

Sub Unit

• Closed Panels

Chair

• Samuel Taylor-Alexander, Monash University

Discussant

• Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen

Individual Presentations

• Big data and bold visions: The political economy of the emergent algorithmic medicine and healthcare - Alan Petersen

• Making the future (socially) robust: ELSI as authoritative endorsement of biomedical promise - Koichi Mikami, KOMEX, University of Tokyo

• Remaking parents: Mitochondrial replacement therapy (MRT) and the fiction of genetic parenthood - Catherine Mills, Monash University

• The last menopausal woman and other future reproductive imaginaries - Andrea Whittaker, Monash University, Australia

Session Organizer

• John Grant Gardner, Monash University, Australia