Trauma is a concept with wide-ranging impact, moving out of limited psychiatric fields into the popular imagination and policy (Fassin 2009). Psychologists now accompany medical doctors in the wake of disasters, ranging from wildfires to war, bringing with them instruments to diagnose, measure, and treat victims. Feeding into neuropsychiatric research on the effects of trauma, epigenetic studies have established yet another …
Author Archives: Maurizio Meloni
Provincializing Metabolism (On the Poverty of Modernism)
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
According to accepted wisdom and textbooks, “metabolism” is a nineteenth-century term and concept, established at the confluence of organic chemistry, cell biology, and physiology. In Microscopical Researches (1839), Schwann spoke of the “metabolic phenomena of the cells,” using for the first time the adjective metabolische, from which “metabolic” entered the English language in the 1847 translation (Bing 1971). This standard …
Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
This article is part of the series: Decentering Metabolism: Peripheral and Southern Diffractions
In the last few years, a renewed interest in metabolic exchange, and in ideas of a porous and permeable body, has come from disciplines like microbiomics, nutrigenomics, and epigenetics. Moreover, a number of technological changes from food manufacturing to different body/technology interfaces have brought to light conceptions of a “new metabolism” offering “a window onto profound changes to the material and conceptual constitution of …
After and Beyond the Genome: Taking Postgenomics Seriously
The Postgenomic Condition: Ethics, Justice, and Knowledge after the Genome
University of Chicago Press, 2017, 304 pages.
Genetics: A Situated View
How enduring is the love affair between our societies and genetics (today genomics)? And what is the role of critical social science in undermining or, rather, mirroring the power of this romance? And what do we …
Remaking Local Biologies in an Epigenetic Time
Premise and Summary
This is a very provisional text,[1] part of a broader book-length research (forthcoming from Palgrave in 2015) on ‘political epistemology’, a construct I use to investigate the coproduction of epistemological facts and socio-political values in the history of the life-sciences (e.g.: how certain views of heredity, development, nature/nurture potentially favor certain political values and …