Maurizio Meloni
I am a social theorist and a science and technology studies (STS)
scholar with strong affiliations to history and philosophy of science (particularly medicine and biology). My authored books include: Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), and Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (Routledge, 2019). I am also co-editor of Biosocial Matters (Wiley 2016), and chief editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (2018). I am currently an ARC Future Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia working on a project called "Impressionable Bodies: Epigenetic Models of Plasticity in the Global South" (2019-2023). I was the recipient in the past of several international fellowships, including two Marie Curie fellowships in the UK (University of Nottingham), a Fulbright scholarship (University of Chicago), an annual membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (NJ), a DAAD scholarship at the University of Frankfurt (Germany), an OEAD scholarship in Austria, funded postdoctoral visits at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG, Berlin) and the BIOS centre, previously at the London School of Economics. A video abstract of a recent publication in Theory Culture & Society can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bxvln8lXDE&t=6s
scholar with strong affiliations to history and philosophy of science (particularly medicine and biology). My authored books include: Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Palgrave, 2016: Winner of the Human Biology Association Book Award, 2020), and Impressionable Biologies: From the Archaeology of Plasticity to the Sociology of Epigenetics (Routledge, 2019). I am also co-editor of Biosocial Matters (Wiley 2016), and chief editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Biology and Society (2018). I am currently an ARC Future Fellow in the Alfred Deakin Institute for Citizenship and Globalisation, Deakin University, Australia working on a project called "Impressionable Bodies: Epigenetic Models of Plasticity in the Global South" (2019-2023). I was the recipient in the past of several international fellowships, including two Marie Curie fellowships in the UK (University of Nottingham), a Fulbright scholarship (University of Chicago), an annual membership at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (NJ), a DAAD scholarship at the University of Frankfurt (Germany), an OEAD scholarship in Austria, funded postdoctoral visits at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG, Berlin) and the BIOS centre, previously at the London School of Economics. A video abstract of a recent publication in Theory Culture & Society can be found here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bxvln8lXDE&t=6s
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an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking
and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic
monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature. Key Words: aerobiome, cities, Covid-19, Hippocratic
tradition, relational ontologies
its resonance with traditional beliefs in the West and contemporary forms of hybridisation with non-Western systems of medical knowledge, which we will discuss in Section 1.4.
considered a welcome equalization to the overemphasis on maternal influences. Epigeneticists are excited by the possibilities of the POHaD paradigm but are also cautious about how to interpret data and avoid biased impression of socio-biological reality. (2) Methods: We review sociological and historical literatures on the intersection of gender, food and diet across different social and historical contexts to enrich our understanding of the father; (3) Results: Sociological and historical research on family food practices and diet show that there are no “fathers” in the abstract or vacuum, but they are differently classed, racialized and exist in socially stratified situations where choices may be constrained or unavailable. This confirms that epigeneticists researching POHaD need to be cautious in interpreting paternal and maternal dietary influences on offspring health; (4) Conclusions: We suggest that interdisciplinary approach to this new paradigm, which draws on sociology, history and public health, can help provide the social and historical context for interpreting and critically understanding paternal lifestyles and influences on offspring health.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/19/3884
and promises of ‘biopolitics’ to understand and frame global
health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking
in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity
and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global
history of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present
and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue
for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current
approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of
the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/887041
See full article at: http://somatosphere.net/2023/diffracting-trauma-in-the-global-south-between-biology-and-culture-difractar-la-nocion-de-trauma-en-el-sur-global-entre-biologia-y-cultura.html/
This chapter explores the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of plasticity – between openness and determination, change and stabilization of forms. This pluralism of meanings is used to unpack different instantiations of corporeal plasticity across various epochs, starting from ancient and early modern medicine, particularly humouralism. A genealogical approach displaces the notion that plasticity is a unitary phenomenon, coming in the abstract, and illuminates the unequal distribution of different forms of plasticities across social, gender, and ethnic groups. Taking a longer view of the plastic body as a ubiquitous belief in traditions predating and coexisting with modern medicine will help contextualize the seeming radicalism of today’s turn to permeability and the exceptionalism of Western findings. By highlighting the complex biopolitical usages of plasticity in the past, the chapter warns against simplistic appropriations of the term in contemporary body/world configurations driven by findings in neuroscience, epigenetics and microbiomics.
an overlooked archive through which the post-Enlightenment mechanization, securitization and abstraction of air can be challenged. Turning to recent findings from both more-than-human thinking
and microbiology as applied to air (aerobiome), we acknowledge that microbiome science is a result of laboratory science; however, we argue that findings from microbiome science point to a reanimation of air as something that cannot be fully instrumentalized or securitized as in modernistic programs of biopolitical control. By drawing on the on the experience of the Hippocratic tradition as a catalyst and a proxy for wider ontologies of flows and corporeal porosity across the Eurasian landmass, we suggest arriving at an affirmative reconceptualization of human-environment entanglement based on notions of permeability and a non-binary ontology of flows. This more-than human approach may not only complicate the alleged simplistic view of the “West” as a dualistic
monolith but act also as bridge and companion to Indigenous and Southern ontologies and experiences of life, non-life, matter and nature. Key Words: aerobiome, cities, Covid-19, Hippocratic
tradition, relational ontologies
its resonance with traditional beliefs in the West and contemporary forms of hybridisation with non-Western systems of medical knowledge, which we will discuss in Section 1.4.
considered a welcome equalization to the overemphasis on maternal influences. Epigeneticists are excited by the possibilities of the POHaD paradigm but are also cautious about how to interpret data and avoid biased impression of socio-biological reality. (2) Methods: We review sociological and historical literatures on the intersection of gender, food and diet across different social and historical contexts to enrich our understanding of the father; (3) Results: Sociological and historical research on family food practices and diet show that there are no “fathers” in the abstract or vacuum, but they are differently classed, racialized and exist in socially stratified situations where choices may be constrained or unavailable. This confirms that epigeneticists researching POHaD need to be cautious in interpreting paternal and maternal dietary influences on offspring health; (4) Conclusions: We suggest that interdisciplinary approach to this new paradigm, which draws on sociology, history and public health, can help provide the social and historical context for interpreting and critically understanding paternal lifestyles and influences on offspring health.
https://www.mdpi.com/2072-6643/14/19/3884
and promises of ‘biopolitics’ to understand and frame global
health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking
in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity
and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global
history of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present
and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue
for an affirmative biopolitics, that at once de-securitizes current
approaches to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of
the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions.
https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/1/article/887041
See full article at: http://somatosphere.net/2023/diffracting-trauma-in-the-global-south-between-biology-and-culture-difractar-la-nocion-de-trauma-en-el-sur-global-entre-biologia-y-cultura.html/
This chapter explores the fundamental ambiguity of the concept of plasticity – between openness and determination, change and stabilization of forms. This pluralism of meanings is used to unpack different instantiations of corporeal plasticity across various epochs, starting from ancient and early modern medicine, particularly humouralism. A genealogical approach displaces the notion that plasticity is a unitary phenomenon, coming in the abstract, and illuminates the unequal distribution of different forms of plasticities across social, gender, and ethnic groups. Taking a longer view of the plastic body as a ubiquitous belief in traditions predating and coexisting with modern medicine will help contextualize the seeming radicalism of today’s turn to permeability and the exceptionalism of Western findings. By highlighting the complex biopolitical usages of plasticity in the past, the chapter warns against simplistic appropriations of the term in contemporary body/world configurations driven by findings in neuroscience, epigenetics and microbiomics.
After years of disagreements bordering on open hostility between the social and life sciences, there appear to be encouraging signs of reconciliation—a shift in terrain where both “sides” of the erstwhile dispute are questioning their very premises. Biosocial Matters: Rethinking the Sociology-Biology Relations in the Twenty-First Century features a collection of readings from scholars on the vanguard of a reframing of biology/society debates within the sociological disciplines. Posing the question of whether a new biosocial terrain is indeed emerging, contributors explore ways this shift may contribute to a “revitalization” of sociology—and the biological imagination as well. Initial readings frame the battle lines through theoretical and historically-oriented contributions that reveal present renegotiations of the biological/social boundaries. Highlights include Tel Aviv University’s Eva Jablonka writing on cultural epigenetics and Exeter’s Tim Newton on the turn to biology. A final section focuses on in-depth analyses of epigenetics and neuroscience, two key frontiers in current sociology/biology debates. Readings include Luca Chiapperino and Giuseppe Testa of the University of Milan writing about the epigenomic self in personalized medicine, the University of Aberdeen’s John Bone on the nature and structure of neurosociology’s promise, Lisa Blackman of Goldsmiths College on the challenges of new bio/psycho/sociologies, and more. Pioneering and timely, Biosocial Matters offers illuminating insights into the long-overdue realignment between nature and sociology in the emergent decades of the twenty-first century.
In Political Biology, Maurizio Meloni argues that thanks to the ascendancy of epigenetics we may be witnessing a return to soft heredity - the idea that these signals can cause changes in biology that are themselves transferable to succeeding generations. This book will be of great interest to scholars across science and technology studies, the philosophy and history of science, and political and social theory.
http://somatosphere.net/2018/06/after-and-beyond-the-genome.html
In Lysenko's Ghost, historian Loren Graham explores the latest attempts to restore the legacy of the Ukrainian agronomist Trofim Lysenko, who spearheaded a campaign to reject Mendelian genetics in favor of a pseudoscientific theory of environmentally induced heredity in the USSR from the late 1920s to the mid-1960s. Today, in the midst of a period of high nationalist and anti-Western sentiments, it seems that a quirky coalition of Russian right wingers, Stalinists, a few qualified scientists, and even the Orthodox Church is now claiming that Lysenko has been vindicated by the latest findings in molecular epigenetics.
questions about the possibilities for our futures. The pandemic—a crisis simultaneously medical, cultural,
political, ecological, and economic—has carved new fault-lines within our societies, intensified existing ones,
and also opened new possibilities for care and human solidarity. COVID-19 is, or should be, both a “wake up
call” (Delanty, 2020) and a “portal” (Roy 2020). The possibilities of a post-COVID world, then, rest not only on
questions of vaccination or herd immunity, but on multifaceted, human processes of recovery, reconfiguration,
and repair. The social sciences and humanities are powerfully placed to inform these processes and the kinds
of post-COVID world we may yet inhabit.
In this global, interdisciplinary conference we invite panels and papers that draw from the humanities and
social science disciplines to attend to these urgent tasks of recovery, reconfiguration, and repair. In doing so,
we also acknowledge and invite consideration of the ways in which the COVID-19 pandemic represents only
one of many intersecting crises, both acute and ongoing, with which many people and places have had to
contend. These include the ongoing crises of settler colonialism and postcoloniality, climate change, ecological
destruction, as well as what theorist Lauren Berlant describes as the crisis ordinariness of precarious life in
late capitalism. We seek to attend, as well, to the unequal distributions of risk and vulnerability throughout
the pandemic, including between the Global South and North.
https://summeruniversity.ceu.edu/biological-2018