ABSTRACT
The growth and expansion of certain fi elds of knowledge within the biological and medical sciences, including those linked to genomics, have widened the scope and range of techniques, theories and tools that can now be used to understand and intervene upon ‘life’. Just as practitioners within these sciences have sought to develop new concepts and techniques by which to study and act upon vital biological processes, practitioners within the social sciences have also similarly engaged in the work of developing novel concepts and methods that are adequate to the task of analysing how potential transformations in understandings of ‘life’ may be involved in reassembling existing cultural, social, economic, ethical and political practices. This edited collection focuses on one idea developed in the early 1990s which has proved central to this task: Paul Rabinow’s concept of biosociality (1992; 1996a)1. Critically interrogating this notion, the volume assesses its usefulness for examining a range of developments in the contemporary life sciences, whilst also thinking through how it may be put to work in new ways. The task here is not to offer a history of how the concept of biosociality emerged or how it has been taken up by sociologists and anthropologists, but rather to consider how it is theoretically and empirically valuable in the analysis of the biologies and socialities that are being assembled by a range of practitioners and social actors across a variety of interconnected sites such as laboratories, biotechnology companies, patients’ organisations, medical clinics, biomedical charities and state institutions.
