The New Biologies: Epigenetics, the Microbiome and Immunities

This issue is made up of a special collection of articles that have been submitted to the journal, which tackle issues that have primarily been the subject and object of the life and biological sciences; this includes pregnancy, obesity, antibiotic resistance, and immunity within the context of viruses and super-bugs. All of these issues in different ways have increasingly become the subject of theories and methods within the humanities and social sciences. This includes approaches, which work across disciplines and intellectual traditions, in order to open up the complexity of what might count as an object of knowledge within these different contexts. Each paper in this special collection is engaged in productive approaches that cut across disciplines and that enable dialogues and exchanges to take place between the social sciences, life sciences and philosophy. The articles respond to some of the new developments across the life and biological sciences, which include the field of epigenetics, the genome and microbiome and new theorisations of immunity. They engage in different ways with emergent issues, problematics, ontologies, controversies and debates within these fields. These are explored at the intersection of science and technology studies (Landecker), new materialism (Jamieson; Warins et al; Yoshizawa); and critical theorizations of immunity, which draw primarily from cultural studies of immunity, including the writings of Ed Cohen (2009), Robert Esposito (2013) and Margrit Shildrick (2010, 2015) (see Davies et al; Newman et al).