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Dizzying advances in biomedical knowledge and technology can save lives and improve health. They can also create new forms of risk, social control, inequality, and ethical uncertainty. Biomedicine transforms selves and social relations along societal fault lines, giving shape to new kinds of person, population, and public. As health and well-being have become a principle aim of government(s) -- and the market -- meanings of citizenship and styles of subjectivity have mutated. This module tracks these dynamics through a focus on two overarching themes: (a) the logic of optimization and contemporary aspirations for human enhancement through technoscience and (b) knowledge of risk as a contemporary social and political problem.
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