Rose and Novas, "Biological Citizenship" (2005)

 The group began with some questions.

[1] pp. 446-7: “These vectors from below….” what does it mean to “pluralize” biomedical truth?

[2] Why is this framed in terms of “citizenship”? The essay moves away from traditional forms of state-based citizenship. What might be the motivation for this conceptual category? Why not “persons” or “subjects” or some other kind of category.

[3] pp. 447: the authors offer an interpretation of the Prozac website. What is going on methodologically here? Are there other examples of this kind of analysis from other works with which we are familiar? What are the limitations, or capacities of this kind of approach?

[4] Does the politics of hope come at the expense of the politics of despair? Does this optimism mask social problems that exist? Is there more to say about social inequalities in this piece? The authors frame their aim as descriptive: what is the goal of description? How is it related to social critique?

[5] What is the relationship between race and biological citizenship? It seems like they are contrasting past eugenics-based conceptions and present practices. But how does race play into, or shape, biological citizenship of the present? 

[7] pp. 454: Is the concept of biovalue helpful?

Discussion followed:

What do we make of the aim of description? How might this article be considered an example of social sciences the framework of “critical red-escription”? Does the fact that they refer to people as “ethical or moral pioneers” imply some sort of valorization?

The authors are developing a set of concepts to make sense of a broad range of phenomena. They jump around from different examples (instances of biological citizenship)—how do they get from this multiplicity of instances to the more general type?

What is the hypothesis of biological citizenship about? That the concept of biology has changed. And this change in meaning has been taken up in all sorts of different ways. But what are these concepts (e.g., biovalue) doing? How do they help us better understand biological citizenship?

One way of assessing the work: for each example, how does “biology” operate and how does “citizenship” operate? Perhaps a concern about what gets left out is already internal to their argument: if the goal is to generalize from examples, then if there are examples that don’t fit the concept, then this should be concerning for them.

In what sense might this not take social critique seriously enough? (i) by the authors’ own lights, they should include a critical (non-descriptive) element, (ii) there is something about their argument that precludes or gets in the way of social critique?

What is the point of the section on political economies of hope?

How might we situate anti-vaxxers within this framework? What sense of objectivity are the authors working with here? Safe to assume a Foucauldian account of truth as historically produced.