Worlding Biodata: Rendering Life in Complex Systems

Abstract (English)

While it might be tempting to analyse the current centrality of biodata in governance, biocapital circuits, and healthcare and biotechnology industries as a new phenomenon, this book argues that these recent developments must be situated in a longer, polytemporal and polycontextual frame. Recent research on entrenched processes of colonial dispossession, distributive justice and biocoloniality highlight the multifaceted processes that entangle biodata to complex global infrastructures. Connecting diverse histories of biodata extraction with its multiple valences in context, the book explores a new social history of biodata that connects developments in biology and information sciences with paradoxes and promises of data that emerge in its global trading and financialisation. The book foregrounds biodata worlds as sociotechnical assemblages in which the practices and infrastructures that render life digital are productive of biopolitical, bureaucratic, infrastructural, and social worlds, life and death.

https://bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/worlding-biodata