Citizenship,care and companionship: Approaching geographies of health and bioscience

Despite a shared interest in engaging critically with biomedicine, there has been little crossover between ‘geographies of bioscience’ and ‘geographies of health’. This paper aims to bridge that gap, using the concept of ontological politics to provide a framework for making connections between geographies of bioscience and geographies of health. Ontological politics can be defined as the conviction that the material or ‘real’ world does not precede our interactions with it and is therefore open to political negotiation. Within social studies of health and bioscience there is a growing body of work that uses ontological politics to gain insight into relations between biomedicine and society and how these are materialized at different sites and scales, ranging from public health interventions to everyday experiences of patient care. This paper takes three of these sites — spaces of biological citizenship, spaces of care, and spaces of cross-species companionship — and explores how they might form shared areas of interest for current research in geographies of health and the biosciences. The paper concludes that ontological politics offers a useful starting point from which to develop research agendas which cross the divide between geographies of health and geographies of bioscience.