Undergraduate Module Descriptor

POL3247: Politics of Biology

This module descriptor refers to the 2019/0 academic year.

Indicative Reading List

This reading list is indicative - i.e. it provides an idea of texts that may be useful to you on this module, but it is not considered to be a confirmed or compulsory reading list for this module.

Meloni, M. (2016) Political Biology: Science and Social Values in Human Heredity from Eugenics to Epigenetics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan)

Lewontin, R. (1991) Biology as Ideology: The Doctrine of DNA (New York: Harper Collins)

Nelkin, D. & Lindee, M. S. (1995) The DNA Mystique: The Gene as a Cultural Icon (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co.)

Latour, B. (2004) Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences Into Democracy (Harvard University Press)

Nayar, P. K. (2014) Posthumanism (Polity Press)

Mills, C. (2018) Biopolitics (Abingdon: Routledge)

Barker, G. (2015) Beyond Biofatalism: Human Nature for an Evolving World (New York: Columbia University Press)

Lewens, T. (2015) The Biological Foundations of Bioethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press)

Habermas, J. (2003) The Future of Human Nature (Cambridge: Polity Press)

Smith, D. L. (ed.) (2017) How Biology Shapes Philosophy: New Foundations for Naturalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press)

Oyama, S. (2000b) Evolution’s Eye: A Systems View of the Biology-Culture Divide (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press)

Kevles, D. J. & Hood, L. (eds.) (1992) The Code of Codes: Scientific and Social Issues in the Human Genome Project (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press)

Hubbard, R. (1990) ‘The Political Nature of “Human Nature”’, in Rhode, D. L. (ed.) Theoretical Perspectives on Sexual Difference (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 63-73

Lloyd, E. A. (2008) ‘Normality and Variation: The Human Genome Project and the Ideal Human Type’, in Lloyd, E. A., Science, Evolution and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 133-147

Smith, D. L. (2016) ‘Paradoxes of Dehumanization’. Social Theory and Practice, Vol. 42 (No. 2), pp. 416-443