1: Populations, biologies, and futures: Research on the scientific governing of life

Overview & Synopsis

This chapter outlines a research area that is termed the scientific governing of life. The chapter includes sections on ‘Populations’, ‘Biologies’, and ‘Futures’, showing how these themes are crucial in the study of biomedicine and society. Within each theme, research is introduced that exemplifies different aspects of the social study of biomedical knowledge production and related power relations. The focus is on how biomedical research and treatment practices orientate towards human life as an object of governing. Studies mapped also include those that expand the relationship between knowledge and governing through foregrounding the agency of more-than-human participants in biomedical practice. Finally, the chapter discusses scholarship that focuses on highly experimental technologies which call for novel methodological explorations on biomedical knowledge applications. The chapter argues that many studies within this research area work at the intersection of Foucauldian analytics of power, new materialist theorizing, and speculative social research.