Social Construction for the Twenty-first Century: A Co-Evolutionary Makeover

Abstract

[...]too the genes versus environment dualism: epigenetics1 is now recognised alongside genetic mutation as a source of variations in cells and bodies: genes may be switched on or off in response to changing external or internal environments. [...]new biomedical techniques can unpredictably alter the relations of self and other along with genotype and phenotype, as illustrated by the case of a young Sydney woman whose blood type and immune system inexplicably changed to that of her organ donor nine months after receiving a liver transplant (Alexander et al.). What is there left to fear in acknowledging that our social beings also express our genetic, hormonal and neuro-physical selves,3 and our epigenetic responses to contingencies in our changing social and material environments-however degraded and precarious? Because my primary intellectual interests have centred around humans, bodies, technologies and (ir)rationality, and have been underpinned by environmental concerns, I have been increasingly drawn to constructionist frameworks that are not founded on a dichotomy between the social and the material or biological worlds. According to actor network theory (ANT), human and non-human elements of systems are entities that are 'bound together in networks [and] are at the same time, constituted and shaped in those networks' (Bijker and Law 13); properties, capacities and powers to act are distributed across human and non-human agents. [...]the 'reveal': the re-vamped model is tried out with reference to issues of urban water cultures, technologies and systems, highlighting the socially shaping effects of urban infrastructures.