Journal of the History of Biology - Call for Papers for Topical Collection: Genomics and Postgenomics

Collections Editor: Nathan Crowe

Please read our Author Instructions for Topical Collections (this opens in a new tab) to get further information about the submission, review and publishing process of Topical Collections.

The Journal for the History of Biology is pleased to announce the call for papers for a topical collection dedicated to Genomics and Postgenomics. This collection will advance historical scholarship concerning the conceptual, technological, social, cultural, and political frameworks surrounding postgenomic biology, questioning its emergence, the activities and communities that engage in it, and its consequences.

With further critical distance from the period in which genomics (and related fields) became recognized as an area of study, we seek papers that will broaden our understanding of the what has been labeled as the postgenomic era. Historians have already established links with the history of genetics and molecular biology and questioned the reality of postgenomics as a historical category. We would embrace papers that not only enrich these narratives but also challenge them. This may be through reimagining the standard accounts associated with postgenomics, delineating its various origins, if any, but they can also go beyond such starting points. Some motivating questions might include: What continuities and discontinuities do we see in the pre and post-genomic eras? What conceptual areas moved from the periphery to the center? What predominantly political, social, technical or cultural trends co-produced postgenomics, for some creating what amounts to a paradigm shift? Are there distinctive practices or experimental designs that we might identify as particularly constitutive of postgenomic biology? What important non-gene, non-human centered histories have been neglected? How can we further apply histories of technology and medicine to generate insights into understanding the characteristics of postgenomic biology and how it emerged?

Similarly, we welcome submissions that explore the effects of a self-conscious postgenomic world. We applaud how HPS and STS scholars have examined the generation, use, and implications of large amounts of data, and encourage further exploration of this important element in postgenomic scholarship. Likewise, STS scholars have probed the complicated relationships that postgenomic research has had with race, gender, and indigenous communities and we especially encourage submissions that build deeper histories of these intersections. We also see opportunities for new histories that look at postgenomics through a variety of social, cultural, or political lenses. For example, what have been the effects on labor practices? To what extent has the notion of a postgenomic biology begun to enter popular culture or biology’s wider publics? How can histories of capitalism and consumption be applied? How have social/cultural perceptions followed the self-described paradigm shift to postgenomics? Can studying postgenomics offer new approaches to the history of biology that cut across a number of fields and domains of biological expertise? Lastly, we would also welcome papers that use postgenomics as a lens that may help us build, for example, new transnational and intersectional histories.