Biosocial wellbeing: Conceptualizing relational and expansive well-bodies

Abstract

Cross-epistemological, transdisciplinary team research on health and wellbeing is critical to improving how we understand the human body and, ultimately, how we care for it. The authors have recently been involved in a different kind of “translational medicine”-translating across disciplines and epistemologies in order to come up with a template for thinking about the human body that captures all of an individual body's relational complexity. This paper explores how a simple desire to think differently about the body can set off a series of subsequent theoretical shifts and political imperatives with respect to health and wellbeing. After describing our recent trials with cross-epistemological theorizing/research on the biosocial body, we use concrete examples to link this work to theoretical and practical priorities in geographies of health and wellbeing. We characterize an approach to wellness that attends to the nuance of individual experience while asking what a liberatory practice of wellness, grounded in a relational and expansive conception of the body, would mean.

Keywords

• Bodies
• Biosocial
• Biography
• Biology
• Biosphere