Our Beyond Bodies theme explores how ‘the body’ is understood and transformed through interaction between biomedicine and publics, and between human and health-related technologies Theme Summary Our Beyond Bodies theme includes members from across the Centre who explore how bodies are imagined and understood in relation to biomedicine, society and technologies. We consider a range of issues in this respect, including bodily relationships with technoscentific developments (e.g. genetics, neuroscience, pharmaceuticals, biotechnological devices). We further examine the ethical, legal and socio-cultural dimensions and implications of modifying bodies – and whether and how this transforms what it means to be human. Central to our analyses is an attentiveness to how power structures such as gender, race, sexuality, class and disability shape experiences of and care for bodies - within biomedicine, health systems and wider social settings. Consideration of social inequalities, regulation, rights and social justice consequently feature strongly in our work. We draw upon and entwine methodological and conceptual approaches from anthropology, disability studies, ethics, gender studies, law, history, philosophy, and science and technology studies. In doing so, we ask how the body is understood in biomedicine and in personal life through embodied experiences. Our activities are grounded in exploring these issues through research, public engagement and teaching activities, alongisde collaboration with scientific and artistic practitioners - ensuring that our work is in dialogue with scientific, health and arts-based practices. Our core research questions include: How are ideas about bodies changing within science, medicine, and wider society? How do structures of power shape people’s experiences and understandings of their bodies? How can artistic and other kinds of engagements help to generate new perspectives about the relationships between bodies and their contexts? Engagement and Outputs Being Human Festival As part of the AHRC UK Being Human Festival, we have drawn on arts-based methods and worked in collaboration with artists to develop a programme of public engagement around bodies, biomedicine and health. Since 2019, our Being Human Festival programmes have spanned creative workshops on short stories, digital collage, photography, dance, illustration and interactive games to explore what the body is and consider its relationship with health, biomedicine and technologies. Our upcoming 2022 programme Stories. Bodies. Health. explores how we tell stories with, for and to our bodies as they move through the world - and how these stories challenge and disrupt ideas about health. Beyond binaries Our position paper (in progress) documents a series of interdisciplinary discussions with scholars exploring sets of supposed binaries, that is: Natural/Unnatural, Material/Digital, Dead/Alive. Through these discussions, we explore not only how the body is understood by different humanities, social science and biomedical disciplines, but how the very boundaries between both topic binaries and disciplines are tenuous, porous and overlapping. We are working on academic outputs from these dialogues which will illustrate the process of working together in an interdisciplinary environment Re-imagining bodies through biomedical technologies Our researchers are engaged in and around novel biotechnologies and/or fields of study that re-imagine bodies and what we can do with them. For example, Julia Swallow’s Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship explores how immunotherapy treatments for cancer – which use the patient’s own body to treat cancer – are approached, managed and experienced. Martyn Pickersgill is undertaking work examining the social life of epigenetics, exploring how ideas about epigenetics circulate within societies and to what ends. Sarah Chan explores the ethical implications of biotechnologies in relation to genetic modification of humans, reproduction and human/animal nexes. Theme leads Sarah Chan Martyn Pickersgill Ingrid Young Researchers and partners Matthew Cull Andrea Ford Jamie Garcia-Iglesias Elaina Gauthier-Mamaril Lorna Gibson Chase Ledin Julia Swallow This article was published on 2024-09-24
