Biolegalities – serie

This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood.

This volume showcases emerging interdisciplinary scholarship that captures the complex ways in which biological knowledge is testing the nature and structure of legal personhood.

This book ? critically examines the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal and biological governance using a multidisciplinary approach. This volume will broadly appeal to scholars and students in anthropology, cultural and media studies, history, philosophy, political science and public health, sociology and science and technology studies.

This book ​ critically examines the COVID-19 pandemic and its legal and biological governance using a multidisciplinary approach. The perspectives reflected in this volume investigate the imbrications between technosphere and biosphere at social, economic, and political levels. The biolegal dimensions of our evolving understanding of “home” are analysed as the common thread linking the problem of zoonotic diseases and planetary health with that of geopolitics, biosecurity, bioeconomics and biophilosophies of the plant-animal-human interface. In doing so, the contributions collectively highlight the complexities, challenges, and opportunities for humanity, opening new perspectives on how to inhabit our shared planet. This volume will broadly appeal to scholars and students in anthropology, cultural and media studies, history, philosophy, political science and public health, sociology and science and technology studies.

This book provides a comprehensive analysis of the empirical and theoretical problems posed by the encounter between law and biology in the twenty-first century. How does biotechnology and new bioscientific knowledge affect our legal institutions, our sense of justice, and our ways of relating to one another? To answer these questions, authors Marc de Leeuw and Sonja van Wichelen examine the complex and often contested ways in which biotechnology and biological knowledge are reworked by, with, and against legal knowledge. As this book shows, recent developments in the life sciences—including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences—and their applications in forensics, medicine, and agriculture test longstanding legal forms, such as property, personhood, parenthood, and (collective) identity, ultimately constituting the current field of “biolegality.” The authors argue that these biolegal contestations represent philosophical and anthropological challenges to existing understandings of exchange, self, kinship, and community. By addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing, the book proposes a programmatic intervention, asserting the pivotal role the study of biolegality plays in advancing social and political theory.