The Body as Biosocial Laboratory

• In Event: The Body as Environmental Sensor - I

Abstract

The post-genomic turn in the life sciences has given rise to multiple experimental approaches dissecting the entanglement of our bodies and their environments. Post-genomics produces indeed a panoply of mechanisms accounting for the ways our bodies intermingle with the external world. Our gut, brains, hormones, blood, and – at a more fundamental level – our genomes all get recast, in contemporary life sciences, as fundamentally biosocial entities carrying various material traces of our ecological and social environments. This view has, as recognized by several scholars (e.g. Lock 2015, Meloni 2018), not only a transformative potential for the ways bodies are operationalized and dealt with in biomedicine, but also on the resulting strategies for governing and intervening upon life as biosocial nexus.
This paper focuses on how knowledge about the biosocial body is constructed across different epistemic corners of personalized health-related initiatives in Switzerland. Drawing from three distinct fieldworks (focusing respectively on exposomics, epigenetics and digital epidemiology), the aim is to provide an analytics of how biosciences construct distinct versions of the body as a laboratory for sensing, and coalescing with, its environments. Specifically, the article describes three distinct epistemic strategies for the constructions of bodies as biosocial sensors that we term in numeris, in vivo, and in silico. These, we conclude, may help further refine social scholarship’s approaches to post-genomics, by questioning too general narratives of a supposed single and homogeneous reactive, permeable and plastic body in contemporary life sciences.

Authors

• Luca Chiapperino Chiapperino, University of Lausanne, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences

• Nolwenn Bühler, STS Lab, University of Lausanne

• Francesco Panese, University of Lausanne, Faculty of Social and Political Sciences