Biolegality: How Biology and Law Redefine Sociality

As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics with an operation of legality that emphasizes how biology and its attendant technologies alter legal form, knowledge, practice, and experience. These empirical and theoretical developments affect how we understand sociality. While public discourse remains preoccupied with the call for more regulation mdash thereby underscoring law's lag in its dealings with technology mdash the social science scholarship describes instead how bioscience and biotechnology are fragmenting and rearranging legal knowledge about property, personhood, parenthood, and collective identity. As it opens broader anthropological debates around exchange, self, kinship, and community, the study of biolegality brings a novel currency to the discipline, addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing

An evidence-based framework for predicting the impact of differing autotroph-heterotroph thermal sensitivities on consumer-prey dynamics

Increased temperature accelerates vital rates, influencing microbial population and wider ecosystem dynamics, for example, the predicted increases in cyanobacterial blooms associated with global warming. However, heterotrophic and mixotrophic protists, which are dominant grazers of microalgae, may be more thermally sensitive than autotrophs, and thus prey could be suppressed as temperature rises. Theoretical and meta-analyses have begun to address this issue, but an appropriate framework linking experimental data with theory is lacking. Using ecophysiological data to develop a novel model structure, we provide the first validation of this thermal sensitivity hypothesis: increased temperature improves the consumer’s ability to control the autotrophic prey. Specifically, the model accounts for temperature effects on auto- and mixotrophs and ingestion, growth and mortality rates, using an ecologically and economically important system (cyanobacteria grazed by a mixotrophic flagellate). Once established, we show the model to be a good predictor of temperature impacts on consumer–prey dynamics by comparing simulations with microcosm observations. Then, through simulations, we indicate our conclusions remain valid, even with large changes in bottom-up factors (prey growth and carrying capacity). In conclusion, we show that rising temperature could, counterintuitively, reduce the propensity for microalgal blooms to occur and, critically, provide a novel model framework for needed, continued assessment

Introduction: At home in Asia? Place-making, belonging and citizenship in the Asian Century

For the authors of this introduction, home is not always or only sweet home. For us, it is constructed with contradictions, ruptures and anxieties. Indeed, the world never fails to present us with ‘real’ people with ‘real’ issues of home. After ‘rescuing’ the idea of home from its two assumed arch-enemies ‘mobility’ and ‘urbanization’, we will proceed to formulate our appeal to reconceptualize ‘home’ and explicate why and how to do so. We have cited instances from Hong Kong, Beijing and Asia at large, not only because the empirical core of this special issue is on Asia, but, more fundamentally, also because we want to take issue with the Eurocentric bias in the debates on home hitherto. We conclude by making a modest plea – or more accurately, to configure various trajectories of thinking on ‘home’ into a plea – to bracket home as (making) place, (not) belonging and (flexible) citizenship