Immunitary Life: A Biopolitics of Immunity

This book explores the growing intellectual interest in the politics of immunity. It argues that taking an immunitary perspective is necessary if we are to better appreciate the body as a site of politics in the contemporary age. It explores the dynamic tensions between community and immunity, belonging and fragmentation, the social and the individual. It creates a dialogue between the social sciences, humanities and biopolitical philosophy around immunity. Immunitary Life empirically situates immunitary politics in real-world debates. This includes blood donation and evolving notions of embodied intimacy in the worlds of transplantation. It examines changing ideas about infectivity, bugs, and the emergence of resistance in antibiotics. The politics of vaccination offers a classic context for thinking about the ever changing relationships between the communal and the individual. Immunitary Life is essential reading for contemporary scholarship in the sociology of the body and the political philosophy of biomedicine. Nik Brown is Professor in Science and Technology Studies at the Department of Sociology at the University of York, UK. He writes extensively on key debates in the politics of biomedicine and the sociology of the body. Chapter One: Immunitary Life: Biomedicine, Technology and the Body Chapter Two: Blood Ties and the Immunitary Bioeconomy Chapter Three: Reconfiguring Species for Immunitary Hybridity Chapter Four: Biotic Politics: Immunitary Imaginaries in Antimicrobial Resistance (AMR) Chapter Five: Spherologies of Immunisation Chapter Six: Co/Immunity and the Biopolitics of Purity - 'Purity Is Danger'