BIOSINQ explores and pushes the concept of ’the biosocial’, building on developments in recent decades in the natural and social sciences and the humanities that challenge the borderlines between disciplines.

The Centre will explore what it may mean to academic research within and beyond the humanities to dissolve disciplinary boundaries between the biological and the social, based on the assumption that all biological life practices some form of sociality, however in very different ways and with different degrees of complexity.

OPENING SEMINAR

In recent decades, academia has grappled with questions that challenge the borders traditionally drawn between the humanities and biology. Fundamental assumptions are no longer stable in the face of global changes, including climate change and reduction of biodiversity. Scientific and technological projects such as the mapping of the human genome and human microbiome, as well as new regimes of big data require novel onto-epistemological and philosophical reflections regarding what it means to be human, what an organism is, and how we can understand the social.

Rethinking and further pushing the concept of ’the biosocial’, inspired by important academic interventions made by scholars such as Anna Tsing, Donna Haraway, Margaret Lock and Tim Ingold, is at the core of the new Centre for Biosocial Inquiry (BIOSINQ) at Aarhus University. The Centre will explore what it may mean to academic research within the humanities to dissolve disciplinary boundaries between the biological and the social, based on the assumption that all biological life practices some form of sociality, however in very different ways and with different degrees of complexity, no matter how we understand this concept.
We envision an academically generous ’open access’ forum for interdisciplinary debate, where different researchers and research projects can meet and exchange ideas for mutual inspiration.

Wednesday 7th October the opening seminar is designed to kick-start this engagement.

If you would like to join send an email Mia Korsbæk <korsbaek@cas.au.dk> and you will get the link.

The meeting room will be open from 9.15 AM. 

Center for Biosocial Inquiries webpage. 

Contact

Jens Seeberg, Professor
School of Culture and Society - Department of Anthropology

Andreas Roepstorff, Professor
Interacting Minds Centre
School of Culture and Society
Department of Clinical Medicine