230153 SE Classifying, negotiating and governing bodies and selves in bioscience and medicine (2012W)

Nowhere is our common citizenship in the republic of science more evident than in relation to bioscience and biomedicine. The ways in which we perceive, inhabit and act on our bodies and selves are profoundly shaped by biomedical knowledge and technologies, with novel developments calling into question long-established understandings of what it means to be human. Drawing on examples from different fields such as (post-) genomics, psychiatry, and globalized clinical trials, we will investigate in this seminar how biomedical and scientific classifications shape individual and collective identities, but also how people individually and collectively negotiate and contest knowledge and practices that affect them. We will put a special emphasis on how human differences and diversity are constructed, negotiated and contested, reviewing recent debates on the scientific and therapeutic value of categories such as ethnicity and race. We will further ask for the social, economic and political contexts in which people become subject to biological and medical knowledge and practice, locating biomedical subjectivities within a stratified context of global inequalities and new forms of governmentality and (bio-) sociality. Here, we will contrast the proclaimed rise of the empowered 'expert patient' with the global distribution of access to health services and pharmaceuticals and the burdens of clinical trials. The goal of the seminar is to develop a theoretically refined understanding of the ways in which scientific knowledge, medical practices, subjectivity and embodiment are co-produced at the intersections of bio-science, biomedicine, and society in the 21st Century. To this end, we will review and discuss recent literature from the fields of STS and Social Studies of Medicine.