Introduction:

Hormones as Bio-Social Entities

The overarching aim of the workshop is to bring together an interdisciplinary and international group of established and emerging scholars working on the overarching topic of hormones, to exchange ideas and synergise different approaches to making sense of hormones. By doing so, we hope that the workshop can enable us to co-develop an understanding of hormones as biosocial entities that sit at the intersection of biomedical, socio-cultural, ethical, and regulatory spheres of life, making them a subject of multiple kinds of knowledge as well as regulation. While hormones are biomedically framed as mediating a diverse range of bodily processes and social relations they also invoke a variety of cultural imaginaries through their association with social activities and identities. As such, hormones are not only interesting in their own right but also an ideal catalyst for interdisciplinary approaches to understanding the complexity of biosocial bodies. Yet, different disciplinary perspectives are rarely brought together in ways that would enable a more critical dialogue at the intersection of biomedicine, society and culture, ethics, and regulation. Through the workshop, we hope to facilitate such dialogue. Ultimately, our aim is to build an international and interdisciplinary research network and co-develop a research agenda for hormones that is capable of integrating different perspectives across disciplines, including social scientific and humanities as well as natural scientific approaches. We hope to use this to inform a larger, collaborative grant proposal for advancing our understanding of hormones as biosocial entities that shape human life across its various spheres.