Worlding Biodata - by Ej Gonzalez-Polledo & Silvia Posocco (Hardcover)

About the Book

This groundbreaking book rethinks biodata as being entangled with lives, infrastructures and global justice. Bridging anthropology and technoscience, it offers a radical new lens on history, science, race and health.

Book Synopsis

This book offers a new conceptual framework for understanding biodata across different temporalities and global contexts. Moving beyond data as mere information, the authors explore how biodata reshapes human lives, scientific practice and global struggles for justice.

Bridging anthropology, infrastructure studies and technoscience, the book introduces a critical vocabulary for understanding biodata not just as a technical artifact, but as a set of lived, shifting relations that are embedded in histories of racialization, colonial dispossession and the digital transformation of health.

Review Quotes

'In this sophisticated and insightful anthropological critique of the global surge in bioscience and bioeconomic activity, we are reminded that global biodata extraction and organization have become a centering force of life sciences everywhere.' Peter C. Little, Rhode Island College

'This book poses a critical question needed at this moment. Is it possible to build ethical infrastructures for learning and thinking about our biologies and health? Using an impressive ethnographic practice, the authors deliver a powerful call for the social groundedness of our knowledge - not only for biodata, but beyond.' Deboleena Roy, Emory College of Arts and Sciences

'This book deftly shows how to understand today's big biodata investments. Gonzalez-Polledo and Posocco evocatively demonstrate how sedimented histories of biocolonial extraction carry forward in data repositories, and how bioinformation dataflows cross domains of knowledge and practice, accruing value and redefining life in the process.' Noah Tamarkin, Cornell University

About the Author

EJ Gonzalez-Polledo is Professor of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Silvia Posocco is Professor of Social Anthropology at Birkbeck, University of London.