Massimo Meloni
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 118681 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Massimo Meloni |
| PRENOMES | Massimo |
| SOBRENOME | Meloni |
| ASSINATURA | MELONI M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2570-3872 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 42 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 296 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 42 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2010 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 8 |
From genetic to postgenomic determinisms
In the past twenty years, conceptual and technological shifts in the life sciences have unseated the causal primacy of the gene. The picture emerging from 'postgenomic' science is one that emphasises multifactorial dependencies between the environment, development, and the genome, and blurs boundaries between biological individuals, and between the body and the environment. Despite the rejection of genetic determinism within postgenomics, forms o…
Troubling the canon
STS is now a global endeavour, with journals, scholars, and associations in a wide range of regions, languages, and transnational networks of knowledge. Building on recent debates about decolonizing research, we contribute to debates about epistemic injustice and asymmetries in the discipline by analysing a large sample of articles in 17 STS journals, published between 1976 and 2023. Our goal is to understand the multiplicity of factors that shap…
A Decolonial Plasticity? Diffracting Epigenetics to Reconnect Histories of the Body
In this article, I aim to move plasticity away from “modern,” or “Western” or “Euro-American,” networks of knowledge. I look at biological plasticity as it is emerging from epigenetics as a way through which contemporary science and social theory is rediscovering the embeddedness, sensitivity, permeability, and unboundedness of subaltern premodern, non-Western, and Indigenous body. I interpret the contemporary resonance of epigenetics in postcolo…
Foetal programming meets human capital
The disciplinary integration of biology and economy is taking new forms in the postgenomic era, transforming long-standing exchanges between human biology and economics. In this article, we first describe how an emerging area of research in development and health economics has embraced, stabilized, and expanded the emerging field of the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD). We map the global expansion of this literature particularl…
Revitalizing Air
The cleanliness, mobility and quality of urban air has regained political legibility in debates on post-pandemic cities. To contextualize the political and epistemological significance of air in urban contexts, we suggest looking at the under-researched experience of premodern cities and bodies, how they developed a complex ecological imagination and solutions guided by findings from Hippocratic-Galenic medicine. While we do not romanticize these…
Forgetting how we ate
Personalised nutrition (PN) has emerged over the past twenty years as a promising area of research in the postgenomic era and has been popularized as the new big thing out of molecular biology. Advocates of PN claim that previous approaches to nutrition sought general and universal guidance that applied to all people. In contrast, they contend that PN operates with the principle that "one size does not fit all" when it comes to dietary guidance. …
Epigenetic science and Indigenous health
Environmental epigenetics is a fast-growing field of scientific research attracting interest from key stakeholders in Indigenous health internationally, including researchers, clinicians, policymakers, and advocacy organisations. It is the study of how various external factors, including food, stress, and toxins, alter genetic expression, and could be biologically passed down to children (and potentially grandchildren). This article explores the …
Biopolitics After Covid
In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of 'biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global history of populations' politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue…
The 'government of men
Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault's legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault's binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other 'technologies of power' in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governme…
A biosocial return to race? A cautionary view for the postgenomic era
Recent studies demonstrating epigenetic and developmental sensitivity to early environments, as exemplified by fields like the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) and environmental epigenetics, are bringing new data and models to bear on debates about race, genetics, and society. Here, we first survey the historical prominence of models of environmental determinism in early formulations of racial thinking to illustrate how notions…
An unproblematized truth
Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story h…
Bodies of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene literature has brought attention to the plasticity and porosity of Earth systems under the dramatic impact of human activities. Moving across scales of analysis, this paper focuses attention on anthropogenic effects at the micro-scale of genomic regulation, neuronal functioning and cellular activity. Building on expanding dialogues at the interface of Anthropocene science, biogeography, microbiology and ecotoxicology, we mobilize…
Thinking embodiment with genetics
The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biolo…
The politics of environments before the environment
Porous Bodies
The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it s…
It's Never Too Early”
In this article, we are concerned with the expanded public health interest in the "preconception period" as a window of opportunity for intervention to improve long-term population health outcomes. While definitions of the "preconception period" remain vague, new classifications and categories of life are becoming formalized as biomedicine begins to conduct research on, and suggest intervention in, this undefined and potentially unlimited time be…
Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape
A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the…
Impressionable Biologies
During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic…
Plastic Reason
Reviewed by: Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees Maurizio Meloni Tobias Rees. Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. xxiii + 323 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978-0520-28813-3). Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason is a significant ethnographic window into debates on the plasticity of the human brain. The book is based on ethnographic fi…
Political biology
A Postgenomic Body
This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body - that is plasticity as a form of life - is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizi…
Eugenics
Eugenics is the neologism coined by Galton in 1883 to mean the improvement of the inborn quality of humankind by better breeding. The eugenics movement had a significant political appeal between 1900 and 1945, attracting advocates from across the political spectrum, from the far right to the far left. Eugenics policies were implemented especially through sterilization laws in America and Europe, and often lasted until the 1970s, when civil rights…
Scientific Racism
Scientific racism, the recourse to science to justify and rationalize hierarchical comparison between human populations, became increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the growing influence of imperial powers on the international arena. At that time, the first truly racist worldviews were elaborated and accompanied by a series of biological measurements of bodily differences between races (for example…
Disentangling life
Race in an epigenetic time
The notion that biological memories of environmental experiences can be embedded in the human genome and even transmitted transgenerationally is increasingly relevant in the postgenomic world, particularly in molecular epigenetics, where the genome is conceptualized as porous to environmental signals. In this article I discuss the current rethinking of race in epigenetic rather than genetic terms, emphasizing some of its paradoxical implications,…
How Biology Became Social, and What it Means for Social Theory
In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, fr…
Indigenous Knowledge in a Postgenomic Landscape
A history of colonization inflicts psychological, physical, and structural disadvantages that endure across generations. For an increasing number of Indigenous Australians, environmental epigenetics offers an important explanatory framework that links the social past with the biological present, providing a culturally relevant way of understanding the various intergenerational effects of historical trauma. In this paper, we critically examine the…
Race in an epigenetic time
The notion that biological memories of environmental experiences can be embedded in the human genome and even transmitted transgenerationally is increasingly relevant in the postgenomic world, particularly in molecular epigenetics, where the genome is conceptualized as porous to environmental signals. In this article I discuss the current rethinking of race in epigenetic rather than genetic terms, emphasizing some of its paradoxical implications,…
Biology without Biologism
The epistemology of the life sciences has significantly changed over the last two decades but many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common (biologistic) understanding of 'the biological' that appears increasingly out of date with recent advances in the biosciences. In the first part of this article I offer…
A Postgenomic Body
This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body - that is plasticity as a form of life - is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizi…
The biosocial
Biology: Scott and Marshall's authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it.There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships.In place of biology, we find an entry for 'biological reductionism, or biologism', a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society.To…
The Biosocial
From Boundary-Work to Boundary Object
In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life- and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of …
The politics of environments before the environment
Porous Bodies
The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it s…
The Transcendence of the Social
Building on Fox Keller’s acute genealogy of the nature-nurture opposition as located in a certain specific social, cultural and political history in the late nineteenth century (2010), in this paper I address a parallel problem: the making of a really modern (i.e. non-biological) sociology nearly at the same time as the “hard disjunction” (Keller, 2010) between heredity and the environment, nature and nurture, was made. I argue rather provocative…
Moralizing biology
In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the presen…
Bodies of the Anthropocene
The Anthropocene literature has brought attention to the plasticity and porosity of Earth systems under the dramatic impact of human activities. Moving across scales of analysis, this paper focuses attention on anthropogenic effects at the micro-scale of genomic regulation, neuronal functioning and cellular activity. Building on expanding dialogues at the interface of Anthropocene science, biogeography, microbiology and ecotoxicology, we mobilize…
Philosophical implications of neuroscience
Biopolitics for philosophers
Roberto Esposito is an influential Italian political philosopher engaged in a renewal of the Foucauldian project of an ontology of the present. In his recent book Bíos, he rereads biopolitics through the lens of his paradigm of immunization (Esposito, 1998, 2002) and tries to explain how, in modernity, a politics of life ‘continually threatens to be reversed’ into a politics of death. His philosophical analysis is profound, and his genealogical r…
It's Never Too Early”
In this article, we are concerned with the expanded public health interest in the "preconception period" as a window of opportunity for intervention to improve long-term population health outcomes. While definitions of the "preconception period" remain vague, new classifications and categories of life are becoming formalized as biomedicine begins to conduct research on, and suggest intervention in, this undefined and potentially unlimited time be…
From boundary-work to boundary object
In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life- and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of …
Thinking embodiment with genetics
The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biolo…
Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves
As Jürgen Habermas has recently pointed out, scientific naturalism represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews.1 In a broader intellectual landscape dominated by research programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and so on, contemporary naturalism symbolizes not only the meta-philosophical framework of these leading…
From genetic to postgenomic determinisms
In the past twenty years, conceptual and technological shifts in the life sciences have unseated the causal primacy of the gene. The picture emerging from 'postgenomic' science is one that emphasises multifactorial dependencies between the environment, development, and the genome, and blurs boundaries between biological individuals, and between the body and the environment. Despite the rejection of genetic determinism within postgenomics, forms o…
The 'government of men
Recent controversies surrounding Michel Foucault suggest tensions and unresolved issues in his unfinished work. Here we interrogate Foucault's legacy in relation to his claim that the welfare-state is a secularization of the Christian pastorate. We challenge Foucault's binary narrative of the Christian flock versus the Graeco-Roman citizen and expand the focus to other 'technologies of power' in medieval Islam. Rather than an outburst of governme…
An unproblematized truth
Foucault’s argument that a major break occurred in the nature of power in the European Eighteenth century—an unprecedented socialization of medicine and concern for the health of bodies and populations, the birth of biopolitics—has become since the 1990s a dominant narrative among sociologists but is rarely if ever scrutinized in its premises. This article problematizes Foucault’s periodization about the politics of health and the way its story h…
Political biology
Disentangling life
Preservation of bread-made museum collections by coating technology
Biopolitics for philosophers
Roberto Esposito is an influential Italian political philosopher engaged in a renewal of the Foucauldian project of an ontology of the present. In his recent book Bíos, he rereads biopolitics through the lens of his paradigm of immunization (Esposito, 1998, 2002) and tries to explain how, in modernity, a politics of life ‘continually threatens to be reversed’ into a politics of death. His philosophical analysis is profound, and his genealogical r…
Naturalism as an Ontology of Ourselves
As Jürgen Habermas has recently pointed out, scientific naturalism represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews.1 In a broader intellectual landscape dominated by research programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and so on, contemporary naturalism symbolizes not only the meta-philosophical framework of these leading…
Philosophical implications of neuroscience
Genetics and philosophy
Genetics and philosophy, by Paul Griffiths and Karola Stotz, Cambridge/New York, Cambridge University Press, 2013, 270 pp., £16.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-17390-2 Twentieth century biology has
Moralizing biology
In recent years, a proliferation of books about empathy, cooperation and pro-social behaviours (Brooks, 2011a) has significantly influenced the discourse of the life-sciences and reversed consolidated views of nature as a place only for competition and aggression. In this article I describe the recent contribution of three disciplines – moral psychology (Jonathan Haidt), primatology (Frans de Waal) and the neuroscience of morality – to the presen…
Scrutinizing the epigenetics revolution
Epigenetics is one of the most rapidly expanding fields in the life sciences. Its rise is frequently framed as a revolutionary turn that heralds a new epoch both for gene-based epistemology and for the wider discourse on life that pervades knowledge-intensive societies of the molecular age. The fundamentals of this revolution remain however to be scrutinized, and indeed the very contours of what counts as 'epigenetic' are often blurred. This is r…
How Biology Became Social, and What it Means for Social Theory
In this paper I first offer a systematic outline of a series of conceptual novelties in the life-sciences that have favoured, over the last three decades, the emergence of a more social view of biology. I focus in particular on three areas of investigation: (1) technical changes in evolutionary literature that have provoked a rethinking of the possibility of altruism, morality and prosocial behaviours in evolution; (2) changes in neuroscience, fr…
Biology without Biologism
The epistemology of the life sciences has significantly changed over the last two decades but many of these changes seem to remain unnoticed amongst sociologists: both the majority who reject biology and the few minorities who want to biologize social theory seem to share a common (biologistic) understanding of 'the biological' that appears increasingly out of date with recent advances in the biosciences. In the first part of this article I offer…
Heredity 2.0
The reasons for a special issue of New Genetics and Society dedicated to epigenetics seem so obvious as to not to deserve a long explanation from a guest editor.Epigenetics, the “collective heritab
Epigenetics for the social sciences
In this paper, I firstly situate the current rise of interest in epigenetics in the broader history of attempts to go “beyond the gene” in twentieth-century biology. In the second part, after a summary of the main differences between epigenetic and genetic mutations, I consider what kind of implications the sui generis features of epigenetic mutations may have for the social sciences. I focus in particular on two sites of investigation: (a) the b…
Political Biology
This book explores the socio-political implications of human heredity from the second half of the nineteenth century to the present postgenomic moment. It addresses three main phases in the politiciza
The Transcendence of the Social
Building on Fox Keller’s acute genealogy of the nature-nurture opposition as located in a certain specific social, cultural and political history in the late nineteenth century (2010), in this paper I address a parallel problem: the making of a really modern (i.e. non-biological) sociology nearly at the same time as the “hard disjunction” (Keller, 2010) between heredity and the environment, nature and nurture, was made. I argue rather provocative…
From boundary-work to boundary object
In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life- and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of …
The biosocial
Biology: Scott and Marshall's authoritative and bestselling Dictionary of Sociology (2009) has no entry for it.There are entries for Wilfred Bion, the Kleinian psychoanalyst, or for sociometry, the almost-forgotten method of measuring social relationships.In place of biology, we find an entry for 'biological reductionism, or biologism', a pejorative term indicating the ideology of the deterministic application of biological findings to society.To…
From Boundary-Work to Boundary Object
In an archaeological spirit this paper comes back to a founding event in the construction of the twentieth-century episteme, the moment at which the life- and the social sciences parted ways and intense boundary-work was carried out on the biology/society border, with significant benefits for both sides. Galton and Weismann for biology, and Alfred Kroeber for anthropology delimit this founding moment and I argue, expanding on an existing body of …
The Biosocial
Eugenics
Eugenics is the neologism coined by Galton in 1883 to mean the improvement of the inborn quality of humankind by better breeding. The eugenics movement had a significant political appeal between 1900 and 1945, attracting advocates from across the political spectrum, from the far right to the far left. Eugenics policies were implemented especially through sterilization laws in America and Europe, and often lasted until the 1970s, when civil rights…
Scientific Racism
Scientific racism, the recourse to science to justify and rationalize hierarchical comparison between human populations, became increasingly important in the second half of the nineteenth century, in parallel with the growing influence of imperial powers on the international arena. At that time, the first truly racist worldviews were elaborated and accompanied by a series of biological measurements of bodily differences between races (for example…
Disentangling life
Race in an epigenetic time
The notion that biological memories of environmental experiences can be embedded in the human genome and even transmitted transgenerationally is increasingly relevant in the postgenomic world, particularly in molecular epigenetics, where the genome is conceptualized as porous to environmental signals. In this article I discuss the current rethinking of race in epigenetic rather than genetic terms, emphasizing some of its paradoxical implications,…
Preservation of bread-made museum collections by coating technology
Plastic Reason
Reviewed by: Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms by Tobias Rees Maurizio Meloni Tobias Rees. Plastic Reason: An Anthropology of Brain Science in Embryogenetic Terms. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. xxiii + 323 pp. Ill. $34.95 (978-0520-28813-3). Tobias Rees’s Plastic Reason is a significant ethnographic window into debates on the plasticity of the human brain. The book is based on ethnographic fi…
Political biology
A Postgenomic Body
This article sets the stage for a genealogy of the postgenomic body. It starts with the current transformative views of epigenetics and microbiomics to offer a more pluralistic history in which the ethical problem of how to live with a permeable body - that is plasticity as a form of life - is pervasive in traditions pre-dating and coexisting with modern biomedicine (particularly humoralism in its several ramifications). To challenge universalizi…
Impressionable Biologies
During the twentieth century, genes were considered the controlling force of life processes, and the transfer of DNA the definitive explanation for biological heredity. Such views shaped the politics of human heredity: in the eugenic era, controlling heredity meant intervening in the distribution of "good" and "bad" genes. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, this centrality of genes has been challenged by a number of "postgenomic…
Sociology (29 obras) · Race, Genetics, and Society (23 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Philosophy (22 obras) · Biology (20 obras) · Philosophy (17 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Politics (13 obras) · Psychology (13 obras) · Environmental ethics (12 obras)