Situated Kinmaking and the Population “Problem”

Environmental epigenetics has become a site of growing attention related to the intergenerational effects of stress, trauma, and adversity. This article draws on a multi-sited ethnography of epigenetic knowledge production in the United States and Canada to document how scientists conceptualize, model, and measure these experiences and their effects on children's neurodevelopmental and behavioral health. We find that scientists' efforts to identify the molecular effects of stress, trauma, and adversity results in a temporal focus on the mother-child dyad during early life. This has the effect of biologizing early childhood adversity, positioning it as a consequence of caregiving, and producing epigenetic findings that often align with individually oriented interventions rather than social and structural change. Our analysis suggests that epigenetic models of stress, trauma, and adversity therefore situate histories of oppression, inequality, and subjugation in discrete and gendered family relations, resulting in the temporal embedding of adversity during early life.[epigenetics, adversity, temporality, intergenerational, maternal care] Biologizing AdversityA growing body of social, biomedical, and epidemiological research demonstrates that inequalities resulting from systemic forms of oppression and inadequate infrastructures of care can become biologically embedded (see Landecker 2016; Wahlberg 2018), a phenomenon that epidemiologist Nancy Krieger refers to as "embodied harm" (Krieger 2005(Krieger , 2020. In the United States and Canada, the rise of environmental epigenetic research on stress, trauma, and adversity corresponds to broader concerns about environmental harm and growing urgency about the long-term, embodied impacts of early life experiences (Lamoreaux 2016;Müller et al. 2017).

Section: Conclusion: Structural Harm Lived Experiences and Reimaginin...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Conclusion: Structural Harm Lived Experiences and Reimaginin...mentioning

confidence: 99%

You Are What Your Mother Endured: Intergenerational Epigenetics, Early Caregiving, and the Temporal Embedding of Adversity

Lappé

2021

“…11Please see: Haraway 2016; Agard‐Jones 2016; Lamoreaux 2020; Todd and Kanngieser 2020; Dow and Lamoreaux 2020; Shadaan and Murphy 2020; Moran‐Thomas 2019; Salmón 2000; Watts 2013, Donald 2016, and Reo 2019, respectively.…”

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confidence: 99%

Microbial Kin: Relations of Environment and Time

Benezra

2021

Microbiome science considers human beings supraorganisms: single ecological units made up of symbiotic assemblages of human cells and microorganisms. Microbes co‐evolve with humans, and microbial populations in human bodies are determined by environments/exposures including family, food and place, health care, race and gender inequities, and toxic pollution. Microbiomes are transgenerational links, disarrangements between different bodies and the outside world. This article asserts that microbes are kin—kin that are made of and making environments, across generations. Post/nonhuman theories have debated the agency, sociality, and ontologies of microbes and things like microbes, all the while appropriating and eliding Indigenous scholarship that directly address the nonhuman world. Microbial kin evokes Indigenous formulations that necessitate reciprocal, ethical accountability to more‐than‐human relations. This article uses fieldwork in a transnational microbiome malnutrition project in Bangladesh to explore what develops for both the biological and social sciences if we call human–microbe relations kinships, and call microbes our kin.

“…For example, attuning to what anthropologist Vanessa Agard‐Jones (2016) calls “chemical kinship” (see also Balayannis and Garnett 2020; Petryna 2002) highlights what is both made and unmade through the toxic relationalities of beings with other beings and things, across lifetimes, communities, and generations. Furthermore, kinship is not always about strategic engagements or willful encounters; toxic relationalities are often unintentional, unwanted, or unknown entanglements (Dow and Lamoreaux 2020; Weston 2017).…”

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confidence: 99%

“Passing Down Pollution”: (Inter)generational Toxicology and (Epi)genetic Environmental Health

Lamoreaux

2021

Self Cite

Concern about the harmful health effects of industrial pollution is increasingly taking on an intergenerational dimension. In environmental health sciences such as toxicology, this has resulted in emphasizing the influence of toxic chemicals, substances, and situations across generations. Toxic relationalities are now being explored through research on gene-environment interaction, including toxicogenomics and epigenetic research through animal experiments and birth cohort studies. Based on fieldwork conducted among reproductive and developmental toxicologists working in Nanjing, China, this article shows how toxicological research both expresses and produces renewed anxieties about "passing down pollution." These toxicological accounts of intergenerational harm problematically work through overly simplistic renderings of reproduction and biological relatedness. But they also have the potential to catalyze creative understandings of toxic relationalities and responsibilities at a moment when making kin is increasingly seen as key to securing livable futures. [toxicology, environment, epigenetics, kinship, China] Wang Bo, a Ph.D. student in reproductive and developmental toxicology at the Nanjing Institute of Medicine and Science (NIMS), picks up a mouse from one of five cages sitting in the corner of the laboratory where we stand. 1 He holds the mouse by the scruff of the neck and brings him to a laboratory bench. Wang Bo sits down on a stool and invites me to sit on another stool beside him to observe the experiment he will conduct today. The experiment explores whether or not "multigenerational exposures"-exposures that transmit epigenetic effects across multiple generations-contribute to reduced sperm counts or other forms of semen decline. 2 The mouse Wang Bo is now holding and will soon kill is a third generation specimen, reproduced in an effort to understand the intergenerational dimensions of toxicity and, in my interpretation, to explore how far toxic relationalities extend.Wang Bo is a member of the DeTox Lab, a group of approximately 20 reproductive and developmental toxicologists at varying levels of seniority that I studied between 2008 and 2011 as part of my research on the science of men's infertility in China. My interest in the DeTox Lab was piqued in the mid-2000s because of their