Environmental Relations in Shaping Uncertain Biopolitical Futures: The Biology of Ageing under Climate Change

The biosciences of ageing have become a regime to investigate
and, possibly, intervene in the uncertain futures of old age in
welfare societies. As previous studies in STS have shown,
research on the mechanisms of ageing has contributed to a shift
from disease-centered thinking to a quest to know and manage
ageing ‘itself’. Providing critical analyses on the biology of
ageing, these studies have theorized ageing as relational and
situated in multiple ways, extending beyond individual bodily
biological markers and processes. While drawing from these
studies, this paper focuses on how the idea of ‘environment’ is
formulated and deployed in practical attempts to manage ageing.
I ask, how ideas about environmental relations and material
surrounds underlie biology of ageing and what kinds of visions
of intervention are produced and advanced from the cellular to
the population level. I address the biopolitical issue of old age
across scales of environmental relations, beginning with stem cell
research on ageing and moving on to demographic studies on
population change and policymaking on healthy ageing. The
paper argues that the iterative making of scientific knowledge on
longevity and societal values on ways people are expected to age
need to be rethought from the perspective of the ecological crisis