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Democratic Mis-haps: The Problem of Democratization in a Time of Biopolitics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 June 2007

Jenny Reardon
Jenny Reardon
Affiliation:
Department of Sociology, University of California Santa Cruz, 235 College 8, Santa Cruz, CA 95064, USA E-mail: reardon1@ucsc.edu
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Abstract

Following the stringent critiques of organizers of the Human Genome Diversity Project for excluding people from the initiative’s early planning, subsequent administrators of high-profile efforts to study human genetic variation, such as the International HapMap Project, have made great efforts to stress the importance of including the people who are to be the objects of study in research design and regulation. Such efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics would appear to represent a positive development. However, in practice they have satisfied few as they fail to recognize the most basic lesson of the Human Genome Diversity Project debates: genomics raises questions not just about the inclusion of people, but about their very constitution. Positing concrete, stable subjects in society, current efforts to ‘democratize’ genomics fail to recognize that entangled in the fundamental questions about nature posed by this emergent form of technoscience are fundamental questions about the order and constitution of societies. The creation of sustainable and desirable forms of governance require us to come to terms with challenges posed to liberal democratic practices and values, such as inclusion, in an age defined partially by this mutual dis/ordering of nature and society.

Keywords

biopoliticsco-constitutiongenomicsdemocratizationpublicsrace

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Type
Articles
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BioSocieties , Volume 2 , Issue 2 , June 2007 , pp. 239 - 256
Copyright
Copyright © London School of Economics and Political Science 2007

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