CASCA2015 Panel CfP: RECONFIGURING THE BIOSOCIAL: EMBODIED ENVIRONMENTS, PLASTICITY AND MODES OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN THE LIFE SCIENCES AND ANTHROPOLOGY

CASCA2015 Panel CFP


CfP RECONFIGURING THE BIOSOCIAL: EMBODIED ENVIRONMENTS, PLASTICITY AND
MODES OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY IN THE LIFE SCIENCES AND ANTHROPOLOGY

Over the past two decades, research in the life sciences has
increasingly focused on how 'extra-human' actors, processes, or
presences—environments, nutrients, microbes, stress, experiences
[etc]—impact not only materializations of health and illness, but our
understandings of the human organism more broadly. Today's life
sciences are moving away from deterministic understandings of human
biology. Brains have become plastic, and the genome mutable—open to
social and material environments and experiences 'getting under the
skin.'

Such trends in the life sciences have converged with developments and
discussions in the social sciences, as attention is increasingly
directed towards troubling the nature/culture divide. While the
methodological and theoretical efforts at undoing this historical
dichotomy are diverse—from multispecies ethnography, to the
ontological turn—anthropological engagements with the biological
sciences are now emerging as a key arena in which to address the
collapsing of the biological human and the social/cultural person.

We seek contributions that take up the entanglements between the
biological/scientifically known body, and 'social' or 'cultural'
lives, as they have traditionally been accessible to the social
sciences. Will the converging of the once-distinct research terrains
of anthropology and the life sciences lead to productive opportunities
for collaboration between the disciplines, perhaps grounding a renewed
biosocial research agenda (Ingold and Palsson 2013)? Or do these
developments, as some fear, represent a new "somatic reductionism"
(Lock 2013), the "molecularization of biography and milieu" (Niewöhner
2011)? We invite considerations of the impact of these developments
for policy, care, and politics, as well as for social theory and the
discipline of anthropology at large. How can social scientists rise to
the challenge presented by today's life sciences—methodologically,
theoretically, or conceptually? How are traditional anthropological
curiosities—with [inequality, social suffering, politics, governance,
environment, kinship and parenting…] threatened, reconfigured, or
reinvigorated by these shifting paradigms? Submissions may take up
these questions through a variety of field sites, methodologies, and
curiosities, including (but not limited to) new forms of knowledge,
material infrastructures, practices, or ethical and epistemological
commitments.

Please send abstracts (150 words max.) to Kristin Flemons
(Kristin.flemons@mail.mcgill.ca) and Stephanie Lloyd
(Stephanie.lloyd@ant.ulaval.ca) by 12 February.