Technoscience in the Remaking of Human Bodies: Knowledge, Identities and Discourses

Abstract

This contribution aims to introduce the topic under investigation in this special section and highlight the connections between the three essays contained in it. Taken as a whole, the special section explores the relationships between the human body, science and technology by focusing both on present material interactions and interventions and on futuristic visions of bodily enhancements. It shows how science and technology studies scholars can explore the co-construction of the body as the result of the interaction between human and nonhuman agency, materiality, knowledge and institutions. From this perspective, the body and its subjectivity emerge as relational phenomena from multiple entangled sociomaterial configurations spanning space and time. Hence, this special section reinforces the call for a processual understanding of living bodies as emerging from the intertwining of human and nonhuman entities.

Keywords

• living bodies
• cyborg
• prostheses
• neurotechnologies
• digital identification