Social bodies and social justice

Abstract

This paper identifies and engages with the social bodies emerging by virtue of the social turn in the life sciences and recent embodied approaches to social justice. Across these diverse domains, bodies are being narrated as shaped by and dependent on their environments. To explore this potentially important and productive convergence, we bring Martha Fineman's vulnerability theory into conversation with neuroscience and environmental epigenetics. We foreground significant intersecting concerns and argue that vulnerability theory – and other embodied models of social justice – is strengthened by taking embodiment seriously, including attending to the social turn in the life sciences. This can enhance the potential traction of these progressive theories. These in turn provide an alternative theoretical framework to the neoliberal lens through which neuroscience and epigenetics have hitherto been translated into policy and practice. We nevertheless acknowledge the potential limitations and dangers of the current biopolitical landscape.

Health Inequalities: Law & the Pain of Others

“…Our current epoch is experiencing both disquiet over philosophical foundations and a 'progressive concretization of aesthetic dictates' as questions of dependency and social embeddedness proliferate across the arts, humanities, social and life sciences. In these contexts there is a growing turn to the social body (Lewis and Thomson, 2019). In the social sciences and humanities, long-standing dissatisfaction with disembodied and atomistic accounts of human life has underpinned work on relationality, dependency, and care.…”

“…Similarly, corporeality has grounded new models of social justice in feminist, political and legal theory. Here theorists have located the body in a new and expanding vocabulary of social justice that engages not just vulnerability, but also precarity, social flesh, depletion, health equity, and so forth (Lewis and Thomson, 2019). These developments have happened at the same time that interest in social biology has been rekindled (Meloni et al, 2016).…”

“…There are echoes of the ‘neuromania’ (Louvel 2020, 205) that characterised the Decade of the Brain and the neuroscience that came to dominate scientific and popular cultures. While some draw parallels with the socio-biologies of the past that were shaped by race, gender, and class prejudices (Edwards, Gillies and Horsley, 2016), others are more accepting (Abi Rached and Rose, 2013; Lewis and Thomson, 2019; Meloni and Testa, 2014). For those who welcome the new knowledge claims – albeit to varying degrees - these are seen to further scaffold work that has long linked disadvantage to poor health and other outcomes.…”

“…It is nevertheless true that social epigenetics as a field now exists. It has the potential to be used for progressive ends, rather than ignored and solely mobilised to shore up discriminatory and punitive policies and practices (Lewis and Thomson, 2019). It should not be assumed that there are only two pathways through epigenetics; that is, either wholesale rejection, or the sort of uncritical engagement with the life sciences that ends up ‘biologising’ life (Nerlich, Stelmach and Ennis, 2020).…”

Blinded by Science: The social implications of epigenetics and neuroscience by David Wastell and Sue White (2017)

“…Instead, it is surely the case that all of us involved in the fields of social practice informed by neuroscience and epigenetics should be expected to be addressed as though we were acting in good faith and had a capacity for critical thinking (Lewis and Thomson, 2019). Professional susceptibility to seduction by new thought styles needs attention, of course.…”