Osagie Obasogie and Marcy Darnovsky’s Beyond Bioethics: Toward a New Biopolitics

“The science will let loose its cascading interactions with utter impassivity; yet how we inhabit that knowledge will be a contest of the imagination, a sedimentation of political futures, a constructed infinity of worlds.” —Patricia J. Williams

What are the consequences of a bioethics that fails to keep up? With the rapid development of new biotechnologies like CRISPR, Beyond Bioethics makes a timely call for a novel take on bioethics capable of addressing the significant sociopolitical implications of these technologies. The contributors to this volume make clear that triumphalist cultural narratives of scientific innovation and progress have obfuscated and even impeded necessary ethical conversations about the development and application of biotechnologies too often touted as the future of biomedicine. Each of the 54 essays in this collection demonstrates how current bioethical frameworks and vocabularies fail to effectively grapple with the complex, intersectional problems that come with assisted reproduction or human genetic modification. Bridging together thinkers across the humanities and sciences divide, Beyond Bioethics models a progressive, interdisciplinary approach to bioethics that extends beyond a focus on the individual toward...