ABSTRACT

This chapter some possible research pathways to study the contemporary coproduction of social life and postgenomic plasticity. It analyses will follow three axes: shifts in notions of responsibility from genetics to epigenetics and implications for a new moralized attention to parental lifestyles; and emerging notions of biolegitimacy connected to demand for social justice and reparation; one that promotes notions of biological finitude and radical situatedness. The convergence of these three axes in outlining an emerging postgenomic landscape illustrates the need to update the sociology of genetics to include these novel areas of contention. The sociological implications of quasi-paradigmshift for novel body–world configurations and biology–society debates is significant. The notion of a “reactive genome”, and the increasing focus on the developmental space between genotype and phenotype, is well exemplified in a number of “postgenomic” programmes, particularly social and environmental epigenetics, microbiomics and Developmental Origins of Health and Disease.