Biological Citizens Readings

This week’s readings looked at the complex relationship between the biological and sociopolitical, specifically in the context of post-nuclear disaster reconstruction in the case of the Petryna readings. Science, rather than being an objective observer/bystander to these interactions, plays a very important and active role by facilitating control over bodies and entire social organizations. 

While reading Petryna’s “Biological Citizenship,” I was struck by how much concurrent social, political and economic change was happening in the period immediately following the Chernobyl disaster. The Soviet Union dissolved only a few years after the disaster and Ukraine was forced to confront the legacy of such a huge, destructive event while still in the process of establishing its statehood and transitioning to a free-market economy. Petryna argues that the handling of the aftermath of Chernobyl was hugely influenced by these political and economic changes. In particular, the production of scientific knowledge--but also nonknowledge--was an important tool for creating authority and maintaining power (also mentioned by Foucault). For the average Ukrainian citizen, science--being able to “objectively” prove that you were affected by the radiation--allowed them access to a “biological citizenship” which gave them free healthcare, as well as other social benefits that were becomingly increasingly more rare as the country moved away from socialism. 

I found the politics and morality of this biological citizenship to be very complex and difficult to judge. In “Introduction to the 2013 Edition,” written two decades removed from the disaster, Petryna describes shifts in attitudes towards victims as a function of changes in society: “Opinions about how the state should address the fate of these Chernobyl victims also serve as a kind of barometer of the country's changing moral fabric. Among inhabitants of Kyiv and other urban centers, there is a growing consensus that the invalids are ‘parasites of the state, damaging the economy, not paying taxes.’” What was a (somewhat dubiously) enviable citizenship before is more and more seen as selfishness, perhaps because the country is further along the road towards full-fledged capitalism. 

In “Introduction to the 2013 Edition,” Petryna mainly focuses on the lack of broad, all-encompassing scientific study of the effects of the disaster and how damaging that is to our collective understanding about the consequences of the disaster. I agree that more socially and culturally conscious, longitudinal, human-based work should be conducted, but I wonder if that was done, if we would be worried about its reception and audiences taking the results out of context without fully accounting the whole host of confounding variables. Especially knowing now, after the Fukushima disaster, that accidents like this are not one-off flukes, I think there’s a responsibility of scientists to not overgeneralize findings from one situation to another, since the effects of such events are so socially and politically bound.