Citizen, Care and Companionhip
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Article Citizenship, care and companionship: Approaching geographies of health and bioscience Beth Greenhough Queen Mary University of London, UK Abstract Despite a shared interest in engaging critically with biomedicine, there has been little crossover between ‘geographies of bioscience’ and ‘geographies of health’. This paper aims to bridge that gap, using the concept of ontological politics to provide a framework for making connections between geographies of bioscience and geographies of health. Ontological politics can be defined as the conviction that the material or ‘real’ world does not precede our interactions with it and is therefore open to political negotiation. Within social studies of health and bioscience there is a growing body of work that uses ontological politics to gain insight into relations between biomedicine and society and how these are materialized at different sites and scales, ranging from public health interventions to everyday experiences of patient care. This paper takes three of these sites – spaces of biological citizenship, spaces of care, and spaces of cross-species companionship – and explores how they might form shared areas of interest for current research in geographies of health and the biosciences. The paper concludes that ontological politics offers a useful starting point from which to develop research agendas which cross the divide between geographies of health and geographies of bioscience. Keywords biological citizenship, care, companion species, geographies of bioscience, health geography, ontological politics I Introduction Ove r th e pas t 15 yea rs geo gr ap her s hav e exa mi ned how bioscience is refash ioning nature-soc iety relati ons (Braun and Ca stree, 1998; Br idge et al ., 2003; Gree nh ough an d Roe, 2006 ; Spencer and Whatmore, 2001; Whatmore, 1999, 2002). Adopti ng a poli ti cal economy perspective, geographers have emphasized the role of biomedical technologies in facilitating the pr oduction of new ki nds of bodi ly com- modities (Parry, 2008) and the recognition of ne w ki n ds of bi os e cu ri t y th re at (B r au n, 2007). This work shows how scient ific practice is changing our relationships with the material world, including the most intimate materiality of human bodies (Greenhough and Roe, 2006). As humans, we see our corporeal substance being extracted and repackaged for the purposes of medi cal res ear ch, treatment and tra de (Co hen, 2005; Davies, 2006; Greenhough, 2006; Parry, 2008; Scheper-Hughes, 2000). We are learning Corresponding author: School of Geography, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, London E1 4NS, UK Email: b.j.greenho [email protected]. uk Progress in Human Geography 35(2) 153–171 ª The Author(s) 2010 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav 10.1177/0309132510376258 phg.sagepub.com 153
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