Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2015 15:30 - 17:00
PAPER SESSION 6 / PECHA KUCHA SESSIONS
special event engages with these issues through contributors to the forthcoming Sociological Review monograph,
Biosocial Matters (2015). Utilising historical, sociological, and theoretical approaches, speakers and commentators will
consider the current bio-social moment, asking whether we really are entering new terrain and, if so, what it means
when looking both forwards and back. In so doing, contributors will invite the audience to think about what these
developments mean for the spirit and practice of critical and progressive enquiry that sociologists have always
identified with and sociology’s relationship with its various publics.
New Bottles for New Wine? Julian Huxley, Biology and Sociology in Britain
Renwick, C.
(University of York)
The question of how sociologists should respond to biology, especially in light of new breakthroughs, has been
debated frequently in Britain since sociology emerged as a subject of mainstream interest during the late nineteenth
century. Each time, proponents of closer relations between biology and sociology have argued we are living in a new
era that necessitates greater cooperation. Indeed, the biological turn that has allegedly been taking place in sociology
for the past ten years has been inspired by just that argument. This paper explores these issues by mining British
sociology's past, specifically the mid-twentieth-century work of Julian Huxley (1887-1975) – the biologist and first
director of UNESCO who was also a leading member of the UK’s economic and social planning movements. Paying
particular attention to Huxley's ideas about the relationship between genes and environments, as well as the doctrine
he called 'evolutionary humanism,' the paper explores a previous era's response to questions about the relationship
between biologists and sociologists and considers Huxley's argument that there is a biosocial agenda distinct from the
priorities of both biology and sociology. In so doing, the paper address a question that has always overshadowed
these discussions: can biosocial science feature in the progressive social and scientific agenda sociologists have
traditionally seen themselves as contributing to?
From Boundary-work to Boundary Object: How Biology Left and Re-entered the Social Sciences
Meloni, M.
(Institute for Advanced Studies)
In an archaeological and genealogical spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the
twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life-sciences and the social sciences parted ways and intense
boundary-work on the biology/society border was carried out, with immense benefits for both sides and important
implications for the wider society at large. This founding moment is delimited by the two figures of Francis Galton and
Alfred Kroeber, and I argue for an implicit convergence of their views and shared aim of separating the social from the
biological.
After this historical excavation, I look at recent developments in the life-sciences, which I have named the ‘social turn’
in biology (Meloni, 2014), and in particular at the burgeoning discipline of epigenetics with its promises to destabilize
the social/biological border. I claim here that, as a consequence of the rise of a new social and epigenetic view of
biology, today a completely different account of 'the biological' to that established during the Galton-Kroeber period is
being given. Rather than being used to support a form of boundary-work between social and non-social disciplines,
biology has become a boundary object that crosses previously erected barriers, allowing different researchcommunities
to draw from it.
Five Neuropolitan Scenes:Living at the Margins of Sociology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience
Fitzgerald, D.
(King's College London)
The city has always been a potent crossing-point for social and biological life. In urban sociology particularly, and at
least since the work of Georg Simmel, there has long been a subterranean tradition of thinking the social life of the city
through particular forms of neurological and psychological life. That tradition is no longer very prominent in sociology.
But it might yet be revitalized by a contemporary neuroscience of 'urbanicity' – a new area of research that entangles
neurological development, categories of mental disorder, and the socio-political life of urban citizens, while making
specific, socio-political claims about urban design, planning, and even 'regeneration.’
In this paper, I focus on the emergence of this ‘Neuropolis,’ in order to re-think the contemporary relationship between
society and biology. I ask: what does it mean to live well in the Neuropolis? How can an attention to neurological life
torque our attention to the politics of urban space? What’s at stake for sociology, in locating itself in such a space?
And how might the Neuropolis help us to think ‘novel’ exchanges between biological and social life more widely? I
address these questions via a short cartography of this space, describing five Neuropolitan scenes: moving from
BSA Annual Conference 2015 216
Glasgow Caledonian University