Bio-objects and generative relations

Abstract

Working Group 3 of the COST Action IS1001 examines bio-objects and their generative relations. This group and its work seek to transcend disciplinary boundaries in humanities, social sciences, and life science and mingle with policy research as well. It also aims to envelop and synthesize various strands of research by taking life science and its relations as subject matter while crossing borders between research settings. One of the key reasons for this networked collaborative approach of Working Group 3 is the scale and nature of previous efforts investigating the development of the life sciences. Researchers in humanities and social sciences, regardless of their collaboration networks, are still far from large scale collaboration when imagining the future of our collective life alongside living objects produced in the technoscientific processes of today. And while there are highly interesting current approaches to studying transformations in understandings of life, they are found among disciplines within human and social sciences that do not interact sufficiently with each other. Philosophy (of biology and bio-ethics), anthropology (of science and medical communities), sociology (of science), political science (of institutional sense-making and deliberation), and legal studies (of jurisdictions), to name but a few, have their own lives in specific epistemic communities of practice. What we do know already is that when we want to think about life – as a vitalist notion, as a biochemical process, as a mechanistic system, or as the force underlying a social system and its politics – we immediately step into a field of competing discourses, framing “life” as an object of representation, intervention, and manipulation in a myriad of ways. In parallel with these academic debates, recent advances in the biological sciences, including new medical technologies, have, however, also led to the analysis of various transformations in the process and understanding of life. These are already articulated with/in diverse bodies – corpora from the literature; organic matter and its networks of circulation; and more “stable” institutions of economic, legal, or political import – with different effects. It appears that bio-objects (1) are rich in potential to destabilize old relations and fertile enough to create new connections that cross the boundaries of academic disciplines and between social institutions. The Working Group 3 has a unique opportunity to address the challenges outlined above and has a two-part main objective: 1) tracking new experimental relations that bio-objects bring about by 2) weaving relations among scholars otherwise unconnected to each other. Accordingly, the group not only investigates the relations that new objects of living and life are capable of generating but also attempts, with a more reflexive attitude, to become more experimental in its ways of working to address the challenges posed by bio-objects (Box 1). Box 1 Our work is characterized by three dimensions in the forming of new relations in the study of bio-objects 1. Global networks: The group attempts to go beyond single case studies in specific national contexts, by developing coherent international comparative frameworks built around the concept of the bio-object. We specifically aim to ground our international comparative framework in detailed local empirical work in which matters of life and living together play an important role. Consider this a call for collaborative research. 2. Common ground: By using the concept of bio-objects as a call for collaboration and, thereby, as a network-generating device, in our studies we explicitly focus on a wide range of experimental relations that are empirically traceable in different contexts. These include material, scientific, social, cultural, economic, and political relations embedded in processes by which bio-objects are becoming a central part of the relations that go into the everyday politics of living together in the 21st century. 3. Informative function: In line with the two dimensions outlined above, we also deliberately aim to cross the borders of the academic community, making our bio-object work relevant for policymaking. This may not always occur through normative modes of operation, but the group shall explore questions of policy in a more neutral, explorative tone. This comes about through provision of EU-wide coverage of bio-objects and their central role as a generative force behind much of today’s vital politics.