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Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition. Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists’ investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing: C...
Since the early 1990s, evolutionary psychology has produced widely popular visions of modern men and women as driven by their prehistoric genes. In Gender, Sexuality and Reproduction in Evolutionary Narratives, Venla Oikkonen explores the rhetorical appeal of evolutionary psychology by viewing it as part of the Darwinian narrative tradition. Refusing to start from the position of dismissing evolutionary psychology as reactionary or scientifically invalid, the book examines evolutionary psychologists’ investments in such contested concepts as teleology and variation. The book traces the emergence of evolutionary psychological narratives of gender, sexuality and reproduction, encompassing: C...
The first comprehensive critical analysis of the practices and consequences of ancient DNA research. This edited collection, Critical Perspectives on Ancient DNA, presents a critical enquiry into the much-hyped “ancient DNA revolution” in archaeology. Offering the first comprehensive and in-depth scholarly analysis of the practices and effects of archaeogenetics, editors Daniel Strand, Anna Källén, and Charlotte Mulcare, along with other renowned scholars from Europe and the United States, address a host of questions, such as: What happens with our understanding of the past when archaeology is married to genetic science? What cultural forms and historical narratives are generated by an...
This book explores how human population genetics has emerged as a means of imagining and enacting belonging in contemporary society. Venla Oikkonen approaches population genetics as an evolving set of technological, material, narrative and affective practices, arguing that these practices are engaged in multiple forms of belonging that are often mutually contradictory. Considering scientific, popular and fictional texts, with several carefully selected case studies spanning three decades, the author traces shifts in the affective, material and gendered preconditions of population genetic visions of belonging. Topics encompass the debate about Mitochondrial Eve, ancient human DNA, temporality and nostalgia, commercial genetic ancestry tests, and tensions between continental and national genetic inheritance. The book will be of particular interest to scholars and students of science and technology studies, cultural studies, sociology, and gender studies.
Bringing the Nation Back In takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the United States and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union, and the development of the postnational. This book contends we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen—global cosmopolitanism and populist nationalism. Contributors argue this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism is a sign of a deeper political crisis, which they explore from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides, the aim is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to "bring the nation back in" by expanding what we mean by "nation" and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles.
Leading scholars take stock of Darwin's ideas about human evolution in the light of modern science In 1871, Charles Darwin published The Descent of Man, a companion to Origin of Species in which he attempted to explain human evolution, a topic he called "the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist." A Most Interesting Problem brings together twelve world-class scholars and science communicators to investigate what Darwin got right—and what he got wrong—about the origin, history, and biological variation of humans. Edited by Jeremy DeSilva and with an introduction by acclaimed Darwin biographer Janet Browne, A Most Interesting Problem draws on the latest discoveries in fie...
This book is about the future: Ireland’s future and feminism’s future, approached from a moment that has recently passed. The Celtic Tiger (circa 1995-2008) was a time of extraordinary and radical change, in which Ireland’s economic, demographic, and social structures underwent significant alteration. Conceptions of the future are powerfully prevalent in women’s cultural production in the Tiger era, where it surfaces as a form of temporality that is open to surprise, change, and the unknown. Examining a range of literary and filmic texts, Irish Feminist Futures analyzes how futurity structures representations of the feminine self in women’s cultural practice. Relationally connected and affectively open, these representations of self enable sustained engagements with questions of gender, race, sexuality, and class as they pertain to the material, social, and cultural realities of Celtic Tiger Ireland. This book will appeal to students and scholars of Irish studies, Irish feminist criticism, sociology, cultural studies, literature, women's studies, gender studies, neo-materialist and feminist theories.
In this book, Touko Vaahtera explores how “bodies of latent potential,” a cultural attachment to the idea of body as potentiality, carries with it hierarchizing hopes about better bodies. Vaahtera combines disability studies, cultural studies, feminist science studies, transgender studies, post-colonial studies, and Foucauldian genealogy to offer a provocative approach that interrogates capacities and capabilities as obvious frameworks for thinking about the body. Vaahtera explores how swimming skills emerged as a specific biopolitical question in Finland, a country that has been described as the “Land of a Thousand Lakes.” Through a profound cultural analysis focusing both on Finnish cultural texts on swimming as well as manifold more globalized texts, Vaahtera considers how the legacy of eugenics and colonialism, the hopes of civilization, and homogenizing assumptions about bodies frame how we think about human capacity.
Genome Finland tells a story of genomic medicine in Finland from the study of rare Finnish diseases in the 1960s and 1970s to the implementation of personalized medicine in the 2020s. The main focus is on the 21st century – the period after the Human Genome Project – and on the establishment of new infrastructures to support genomic medicine, such as biobanks. The book opens up the reasoning and discussions as well as the settings and events through which Finnish medical genetics reached the top level of international biomedicine in the late 1990s, biobanks and biobank research evolved during the 2000s and 2010s, and large transnational public-private partnership projects utilising massive amounts of genome and patient data started to dominate also Finnish research into the 2020s. In particular, Genome Finland examines and exposes the connections between biomedical science, ‘knowledge-based’ economy and business, and innovation policy in Finland during the past decades.
In the age of Apple Watches and Fitbits, the concept of “health” emerges through an embodied experience of a digital health device or platform, not simply through the biomedical data it provides. Sensing Health: Bodies, Data, and Digital Health Technologies analyzes popular digital health technologies as aesthetic experiences to understand how these devices and platforms have impacted the way individuals perceive their bodies, behaviors, health, and well-being. By tracing design alongside embodied experiences of digital health, Kressbach shows how these technologies aim to quantify, track and regulate the body, while at the same time producing moments that bring the body’s affordances ...