The biosocial event : responding to innovation in the life sciences

Innovation in the life sciences calls for reflection on how sociologies separate and relate life processes and social processes. To this end we introduce the concept of the ‘biosocial event’. Some life processes and social processes have more mutual relevance than others. Some of these relationships are more negotiable than others. We show that levels of relevance and negotiability are not static but can change within existing relationships. Such changes, or biosocial events, lie at the heart of much unplanned biosocial novelty and much deliberate innovation. We illustrate and explore the concept through two examples – meningitis infection and epidemic, and the use of sonic ‘teen deterrents’ in urban settings. We then consider its value in developing sociological practice oriented to critically constructive engagement with innovation in the life sciences

Exploring the transdisciplinary trajectory of suggestibility

Traditionally considered a deficiency in will power and rationality, suggestibility has proven a troublesome concept for psychology. It was forgotten, rediscovered, denounced, undermined experimentation and recently became the ambiguous issue at the centre of concern about child witness' credibility in sexual abuse cases. This paper traces the history of suggestibility to show how it raises the 'paradox of the psychosocial'. Drawing on the work of Deleuze and Stengers, and on interviews with legal practitioners, this paper demonstrates how suggestibility carries this paradox into theory, research and legal practice. It thereby opens up a transdisciplinary perspective, allowing for questions of power and knowledge to be asked as performative questions. In the spirit of a process-centred ontology for psychology, I argue that suggestibility constitutes a 'rhythm of problematization', a folding, giving a subversive insight into dynamics of subjectification and application, and offering new perspectives towards issues of children's credibility and protection

Liminality in Practice: A Case study in Life Sciences Research

Contemporary health challenges (e.g. diabetes, climate change, antimicrobial resistance) are underpinned by complex interrelationships between behavioral, cultural, social, environmental and biological processes. Current experimental systems are only partially relevant to the problems they investigate, but aspirations to embed interdisciplinary working and community engagement into life scientists’ work inresponse to this partiality have proven difficult in practice. This paper explores one UK university-based life sciences initiative as it seeks to develop modes of working which respond to this complexity. Drawing on ‘liminal hotspots’ as a sensitizing concept, we explore how participating academics articulate complex problems, knowledge-making, interdisciplinary working and community engagement. Our analysis shows they become recurrently ‘trapped’ (institutionally and epistemologically) between fixed/universalized cosmologies of biology/disease, and more contemporary cosmologies in which biology and disease are conceptualized as situated and evolving. Adopting approaches to community organizing based on ‘process pragmatism’ we propose ways in which life scientists might radically reorganise their practice and move beyond current limiting enactments of interdisciplinary and community engaged working. In doing so we claim that the relevance and ‘humanness’ of life scienceresearch will be increased

Navigating the bio-politics of childhood

Childhood research has long shared a bio-political terrain with state agencies in which children figure primarily as ‘human futures’. In the 20th century bio-social dualism helped to make that terrain navigable by researchers, but, as life processes increasingly become key sites of bio-political action, bio-social dualism is becoming less useful as a navigational aid. The contribution that a view of childhood as a ‘hybrid’ phenomenon might make to developing new navigational aids is considered. A Foucaultian reading of the history of childhood bio-politics yields three ‘multiplicities’ of childhood. The assistance these can offer in navigating the contemporary biopolitics of childhood is described