Classificatory struggles and the importance of illuminating contemporary biopolitics for the future of medical sociology
In this plenary I illuminate further some of the substantive, methodological and theoretical issues addressed in my book, "The Gene, the Clinic and the Family: Diagnosing Dysmorphology, Reviving Medical Dominance". Building on these issues, I go on to elaborate their relevance for thinking with care about contemporary biopolitics and the future of medicine. In the context of late capitalism and its culture of endless reform (Latimer & Munro 2015), I suggest how medical sociology needs to continuously address the specifics of ‘world-making’ in order to keep a politics of imagination that is open and critical (Latimer & Skeggs 2011). Illuminating the specifics of ‘world-making’ in the clinic, in the laboratory and in the institutions that deliver health care opens up debate to how ‘classificatory struggles’ (Tyler 2015) are elicited and enacted in order to reproduce, resist or transform assymetrical social relations and regimes of value.