Download or read book Impressionable Biologies written by Maurizio Meloni and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-01-10 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic" disciplines. The rise of epigenetics in particular signals a shift from notions of biological fixedness to ideas of plasticity and "impressionability" of biological material. This book investigates a long history of the beliefs about the plasticity of human biology, starting with ancient medicine, and analyses the biopolitical techniques required to govern such permeability. It looks at the emergence of the modern body of biomedicine as a necessary displacement or possibly reconfiguration of earlier plastic views. Finally, it analyses the returning of plasticity to contemporary postgenomic views and argues that postgenomic plasticity is neither a modernistic plasticity of instrumental management of the body nor a postmodernist celebration of potentialities. It is instead a plasticity that disrupts clear boundaries between openness and determination, individual and community, with important implications for notions of risk, responsibility and intervention.
Download or read book A Multidisciplinary Approach to Embodiment written by Nancy K Dess and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-22 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a collection of pithy and accessible essays on the nature and implications of human embodiment which explore the concept of ‘human being’ in the most unprecedented manner through seemingly disparate academic disciplines. With contributions from key researchers from around the world, this book engages with embodiment through the lens of "new materialism". It eschews the view that human beings are debased by materiality and creates a vision of humans as fully embodied creatures situated in a richly populated living planet. The essays in this volume will illustrate and foster new materialist thought in areas including psychology, astrophysics, geology, biology, sociology, philosophy, and the performing arts. The book’s engaging and enlightening content is made accessible to readers with relatively little background in the various academic disciplines. This is an important and fascinating text which invites readers to explore and expand their understanding and experience of embodiment. It will be particularly useful for postgraduate students and scholars of theoretical and philosophical psychology, philosophy of the mind, and social and cultural anthropology.
Download or read book The Handbook of DOHaD and Society written by Michelle Pentecost and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2024-06-30 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An indispensable guide for scholars completing interdisciplinary research in the field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease.
Download or read book Biosocial Worlds written by Jens Seeberg and published by UCL Press. This book was released on 2020-09-29 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biosocial Worlds presents state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and non-human life – biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of biology and the social, it explores what it means to be human in these worlds. Growing separation of scientific disciplines for more than a century has maintained a separation of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ that has created a space for projections between the two. Such projections carry a directional causality and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human life, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation. Based on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the UK and USA, the volume explores what has been created in the space between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’, with a view to rethink ‘the biosocial’. Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease and wider issues of epigenetics. Many of the chapters engage with constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments, and engage with analysis of the concept of ‘environment’. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies explore how ‘health’ and ‘environment’ are entangled in ways that move their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability. The subtitle of this volume captures these insights through the concept of ‘health environment’, seeking to move the engagement of anthropology and biology beyond deterministic projections.
Download or read book Of Human Born written by Caroline Arni and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman’s body has, once again, become a fraught issue—from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk—Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of “life before birth.” Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of “fetal life” by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother’s living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of “the human” in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the “modern embryo” is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman’s body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.
Download or read book New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress written by Yafeng Shan and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-01 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of original essays offers a comprehensive examination of scientific progress, which has been a central topic in recent debates in philosophy of science. Traditionally, debates over scientific progress have focused on different methodological approaches, notably the epistemic and semantic approaches. The chapters in Part I of the book examine these two traditional approaches, as well as the newly revived functional and newly developed noetic approaches. Part II features in-depth case studies of scientific progress from the history of science. The chapters cover individual sciences including physics, chemistry, evolutionary biology, seismology, psychology, sociology, economics, and medicine. Finally, Part III of the book explores important issues from contemporary philosophy of science. These chapters address the implications of scientific progress for the scientific realism/anti-realism debate, incommensurability, values in science, idealisation, scientific speculation, interdisciplinarity, and scientific perspectivalism. New Philosophical Perspectives on Scientific Progress will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on the history and philosophy of science.
Download or read book Human Being and Vulnerability written by Joseph Sverker and published by BoD – Books on Demand. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner. In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence. Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.
Download or read book Cultural Memory written by Donald R. Wehrs and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2022-11-29 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing together neuroscientists, social scientists, and humanities scholars in cross-disciplinary exploration of the topic of cultural memory, this collection moves from seminal discussions of the latest findings in neuroscience to variegated, specific case studies of social practices and artistic expressions. This volume highlights what can be gained from drawing on broad interdisciplinary contexts in pursuing scholarly projects involving cultural memory and associated topics. The collection argues that contemporary evolutionary science, in conjunction with studies interconnecting cognition, affect, and emotion, as well as research on socially mediated memory, provides innovatively interdisciplinary contexts for viewing current work on how cultural and social environments influence gene expression and neural circuitry. Building on this foundation, Cultural Memory turns to the exploration of the psychological processes and social contexts through which cultural memory is shaped, circulated, revised, and contested. It investigates how various modes of cultural expression—architecture, cuisine, poetry, film, and fiction—reconfigure shared conceptualizing patterns and affectively mediated articulations of identity and value. Each chapter showcases research from a wide range of fields and presents diverse interdisciplinary contexts for future scholarship. As cultural memory is a subject that invites interdisciplinary perspectives and is relevant to studying cultures around the world, of every era, this collection addresses an international readership comprising scholars from the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences, from advanced undergraduates to senior researchers.
Download or read book Routledge International Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology written by Brent D. Slife and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-28 with total page 757 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Routledge International Handbook of Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology is a compilation of works by leading scholars in theoretical and philosophical psychology that offers critical analyses of, and alternatives to, current theories and philosophies typically taken for granted in mainstream psychology. Within their chapters, the expert authors briefly describe accepted theories and philosophies before explaining their problems and exploring fresh, new ideas for practice and research. These alternative ideas offer thought-provoking ways of reinterpreting many aspects of human existence often studied by psychologists. Organized into five sections, the volume covers the discipline of psychology in general, various subdisciplines (e.g., positive psychology and human development), concepts of self and identity as well as research and practice. Together the chapters present a set of alternative ideas that have the potential to take the field of psychology in fruitful directions not anticipated in more traditional theory and research. This handbook will be a valuable resource for students and scholars of the theory, assumptions, and history of psychology.
Download or read book Personhood in the Age of Biolegality written by Marc de Leeuw and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-11-18 with total page 267 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood. Key questions include: What do the new biosciences do to our social, cultural, and legal conceptions of personhood? How does our legal apparatus incorporate new legitimations from the emerging biosciences into its knowledge system? And what kind of ethical, socio-political, and scientific consequences are attached to the establishment of such new legalities? The book examines these problems by looking at materialities, the posthuman, and the relational in the (un)making of legalities. Themes and topics include postgenomic research, gene editing, neuroscience, epigenetics, precision medicine, regenerative medicine, reproductive technologies, border technologies, and theoretical debates in legal theory on the relationship between persons, property, and rights.
Download or read book Medical Sociology written by William Cockerham and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 467 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The most comprehensive major academic textbook available on its topic, this classic text presents the most important research studies in the field. The author integrates engaging first-person accounts from patients, physicians, and other health care providers throughout the text. Since its inception, this book's principal goal has been to introduce students to the field of medical sociology and serve as a reference for faculty by presenting the most current ideas, issues, concepts, themes, theories, and research findings in the field. This new edition is heavily revised with updated data and important new additions. New to this edition: A contemporary account of medical sociology’s subfields (Chapter 1) New chapter on COVID-19 (Chapter 3) Update on the widening gap in life expectancy between the rich and the poor (Chapter 4) New chapter on gender and health, including the convergence of life expectancy between men and women and its reversal during the COVID-19 pandemic (Chapter 5) Updated chapter on aging and expanded discussion of health and race (Chapter 6) New developments in doctor-patient interaction, including telemedicine (Chapter 10) The survival of the Affordable Care Act (Chapter 16)
Download or read book Integrative Approaches in Environmental Health and Exposome Research written by Élodie Giroux and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Research on the relationship between health and the environment in a postgenomic context is increasingly aimed at understanding the various exposures as a whole, simultaneously taking into account data pertaining to the biology of organisms and the physical and social environment. Exposome research is a paradigmatic case of this new trend in environmental health studies. This book takes a multidisciplinary approach focusing on the conceptual, epistemological, and sociological reflections in the latest research on environmental and social determinants of health and disease. It offers a combination of theoretical and practical approaches and the authors are scholars from a multidisciplinary background (epidemiology, geography, philosophy of medicine and biology, sociology). Crucially, the book balances the benefit and cost of the integration of biological and social factors when modelling aetiology of disease.
Download or read book Posthumanism in Practice written by Christine Daigle and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-01-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Problematic assumptions which see humans as special and easily defined as standing apart from animals, plants, and microbiota, both consciously and unconsciously underpin scientific investigation, arts practice, curation, education, and research across the social sciences and humanities. This is the case particularly in those traditions emerging from European and Enlightenment philosophies. Posthumanism disrupts these traditional humanist outlooks and interrogates their profound shaping of how we see ourselves, our place in the world, and our role in its protection. In Posthumanism in Practice, artists, researchers, educators, and curators set out how they have developed and responded to posthumanist ideas across their work in the arts, sciences, and humanities, and provide examples and insights to support the exploration of posthumanism in how we can think, create, and live. In capturing these ideas, Posthumanism in Practice shows how posthumanist thought can move beyond theory, inform action, and produce new artefacts, effects, and methods that are more relevant and more useful for the incoming realities for all life in the 21st century.
Download or read book Lamarckism and the Emergence of Scientific Social Sciences in Nineteenth Century Britain and France written by Snait B. Gissis and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2024 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zusammenfassung: The book presents an original synthesizing framework on the relations between 'the biological' and 'the social'. Within these relations, the late nineteenth-century emergence of social sciences aspiring to be constituted as autonomous, as 'scientific' disciplines, is described, analyzed and explained. Through this framework, the author points to conceptual and constructive commonalities conjoining significant founding figures - Lamarck, Spencer, Hughlings Jackson, Ribot, Durkheim, Freud - who were not grouped nor analyzed in this manner before. Thus, the book offers a rather unique synthesis of the interactions of the social, the mental, and the evolutionary biological - Spencerian Lamarckism and/or Neo-Lamarckism - crystallizing into novel fields. It adds substantially to the understanding of the complexities of evolutionary debates during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. It will attract the attention of a wide spectrum of specialists, academics, and postgraduates in European history of the nineteenth century, history and philosophy of science, and history of biology and of the social sciences, including psychology
Download or read book Principles of Gender Specific Medicine written by Marianne Legato J and published by Academic Press. This book was released on 2023-04-03 with total page 932 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Awarded with the 2018 Prose Award in Clinical Medicine, the third edition of Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine explored and described exciting new areas in biomedicine that integrated technology into the treatment of disease and the augmentation of human function. Novel topics such as the sex-specific aspects of space medicine, the development and the use of genderized robots and a discussion of cyborgs were included in the third edition, providing a preview of the expanding world of sex-specific physiology and therapeutics. This Fourth Edition is a continuation of the mission to trace the relevance of biological sex to normal function and to the experience of disease in humans.We are now twenty years into the postgenomic era. The investigation of how the genome produces the phenome has led to fascinating insights as well as yet unanswered questions. Principles of Gender-Specific Medicine, Fourth Edition, has a central theme: discuss advances in understanding the role of epigenetics in regulating gene expression in a dynamic, sex-specific way during human life. It explores the protean role of epigenetics in human physiology, the relevance of environmental experience to human function, the therapeutic promise of cutting-edge methodologies like gene manipulation, the preparation of humans for space travel, the use of artificial intelligence in detection and therapeutic decisions concerning disease states, the possibilities for technological support of not only compromised individuals but of the augmentation of human function, and an analysis of the benefits, limitations and issues that surround our current expectations of personalized medicine. Covers the most important developments in biomedical research in the past decade, with a thoughtful analysis of how they impact patient care Discusses the feasibility and usefulness of personalized medicine, the limits and promise of genetic editing, the basis for variation in sexual identity and how artificial intelligence and technology will affect basic human function as well as correcting disability Promotes and facilitates discussions about the ethics and governance issues that surround much of what science is now able to do at the most basic levels of human’s physiology
Download or read book The Temporalities of Waste written by Fiona Allon and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-10-29 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the complex and unpredictable temporalities of waste. Reflecting on waste in the context of sustainability, materiality, social practices, subjectivity and environmental challenges, the book covers a wide range of settings, from the municipal garbage crisis in Beirut, to food rescue campaigns in Hong Kong and the toxic by-products of computer chip production in Silicon Valley. Waste is one of the most pressing issues of the day, central to environmental challenges and the development of healthier and more sustainable futures. The emergence of the new field of discard studies, in addition to expanding research across other disciplines within the social sciences, is testament to the centrality of waste as a crucial social, material and cultural problem and to the need for multi- and transdisciplinary approaches like those provided in this volume. This edited collection seeks to develop a framework that understands the material properties of different kinds of waste, not as fixed, stable or singular but asdynamic, relational and often invisible. It brings together new and cutting-edge research on the temporalities of waste by a diverse range of international authors. Collectively, this research presents a persuasive argument about the need to give more credence to the capacities of waste to provoke us in materially and temporally complex ways, especially those substances that complicate our understandings of life as bounded duration. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, cultural studies, anthropology and human geography.
Download or read book Back to the Stone Age written by Ben Pitcher and published by McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP. This book was released on 2022-12-15 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prehistoric human life is a common reference point in contemporary culture, inspiring attempts to become happier, healthier, or better people. Exploited by capitalism, overwhelmed by technology, and living in the shadow of environmental catastrophe, we call on the prehistoric to escape the present, and to model alternative ways of living our lives. In Back to the Stone Age Ben Pitcher explores how ideas about race are tightly woven into the powerful origin stories we use to explain who we are, where we came from, and what we are like. Using a broad range of examples from popular culture – from everyday practices like lighting fires and walking in the woods to engagements with genetic technologies and Neanderthal DNA, from megaliths and museum mannequins to television shows and best-selling nonfiction – Pitcher demonstrates how prehistory is alive in the twenty-first century, and argues that popular flights back in time provide revealing insights into present-day anxieties, obsessions, and concerns. Back to the Stone Age shows that the human past is not set in stone. By opening up the prehistoric to critical contestation, Pitcher places racial justice at the centre of questions about the existence and persistence of Homo sapiens in the contemporary world.
