Reframing the Bio-Social in Child Research: Review of Lee, N. (2013). Childhood and Biopolitics: Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Abstract

In their seminal paper The Body Made Flesh, John Evans, Brian Davies and Emma Rich (2009) review the wide range of scholarship on children's and distinguish three approaches in the context of which the can and has been studied within the broader field of childhood studies: social constructionism (the body without flesh), post-structuralism with an emphasis on affects (the body with fleshy feelings), and corporealism (the body made flesh). According to the authors, the third perspective promises to overcome the nature - divide. However, as the authors noted in 2009 this was yet an unfinished project. As they write:Shilling, Prout, James and others provide invaluable insight into the connections between corporeal as agentic entities, lived experience and culture. But theirs (like ours) is an unfinished project, still stronger on conceptualising and documenting relationships between biology and culture than analysing particularly the first of these elements (Evans et al., 2009, p. 404)How indeed can one avoid dualist thinking and binary oppositions when studying children and/or children's bodies? Nice Lee in his recently published book Childhood and Biopolitics: Climate Change, Life Processes and Human Futures moves, in my view, far beyond the existing approaches in this field by taking a very different point of departure: Nick Lee does not begin by exploring the as such but explores the life processes of which children's are constitutive parts. Through exploring a long series of detailed examples such as the introduction of the Mosquito teen deterrent by the UK Company Compound Security Systems (Chapter 2), recent debates in the fields of evolutionary psychology and epigenetics (Chapter 3), the Durham Fish Oil trial for mental enhancement (Chapter 4), the recent Global Alliance for Vaccines and Immunisation programmes (Chapter 5) and the framing of children in the context the Climate Change debate (Chapters 6 & 7), Nick Lee introduces the terms multiplicities of life, voice and (pp. 50-54) and events (p. 77) to account for the endless-in- principle and yet distinct-in-practice possibilities of organizing matter and subjectivity - in my words. In his own words:A bio-social event is a meeting of one or more life processes and one or more social processes to create a new relationship of mutual relevance between the two (p. 74)Seen in this perspective, the child entails other bodies (e.g. commensal bacteria or human cells, p. 73) as well as is entailed in a variety of broader bio-political or bio-social processes and arrangements such as recent global vaccination policies or much debated natural resource management. All this takes place in dynamic ways, which can be locally distinct, and traced or scrutinised by appropriate cross-disciplinary methods and reflective analysis. Nick Lee invites us to participate in an intellectually challenging endeavour, which, in my view, promises a great balance between micro-explorations of concrete body-related practices (that may even differ between two nursery schools of the same city cf. Kontopodis, 2012) and macro-approaches to corporeality (such as Nikolas Rose's politics of life itself, cf. Rose 2006).Nick Lee, who has extensively reviewed a wide range of psychological, sociological and philosophical approaches in his previous very successful books (Lee, 2001; 2005), draws here on Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Nikolas Rose as well as on scholars such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Gilles Deleuze. Yet, in my view, he sets the foundations for a highly inventive and thought-provoking approach that moves beyond all these existing accounts. Nick Lee's book reframes the bio-social with regard to child research and has challenging implications across a wide range of theories and methodologies for the study of children and childhood.Through his very detailed and timely empirical explorations, Nick Lee introduces not only a powerful conceptual frame but also a methodology for mapping and navigating further bio-political formations that concern children's lives and elsewhere. …