Ethics, Health Data, and Bio-Citizenship: From the Politics of Body to the Politics of Knowledge

As Kelly Happe, Jenell Johnson and Marina Levina1 affirm in the introduction of their collective volume Bio-Citizenship. The Politics of Bodies, Governance, and Power, like any scholarship concept, the origins of biocitizenship are distributed, and depending on one’s critical orientation and political commitments, the term can have substantially different meanings. For this reason, in the next section the present introduction, we will operate a short reconstruction of the history of this concept, trying to explain why the notion of “bio-citizenship”, despite its complexity and sometimes imprecise demarcation, has gained much currency among scholars of science and technology as well as social scientists working on the societal and political implications of biotechnologies and biomedicine, especially as an umbrella concept promoting healthcare, personalized treatments, and precision medicine.