Over the course of the last several decades, innovations in the biosciences, the area of biotechnology, and medicine have changed the individual experience of pregnancy and giving birth as well as social institutions (e.g., the health system, the judiciary, the insurance industry) and the collective treatment of disabilities, illness, and death. The enhanced potential for altering and “optimizing” the human body is accompanied by an increasing control of external nature. The debates on climate change, genetically modified food, and renewable raw materials show that the “environment” can be molded to such an extent that any notion of nature unaffected by human intervention seems obsolete.

The social requisites, framework conditions, and consequences of bioscientific knowledge and biotechnological innovations have only just begun to be empirically analyzed and theoretically reflected in the social sciences in German-speaking countries. Although there is essentially a great need for reflection of these developments on the part of society at large, in Germany the social implications of this transformation process are primarily being discussed by theologians and philosophers or natural and medical scientists. The complex (scientific-)historical contexts of the origins, material-symbolic requisites, underlying cultural assumptions, and social consequences of bioscientific discourses and practices are rarely addressed or systematically explored.

The research area described here seeks to deal with and close this research gap. Contemporary societies are characterized by increasing knowledge about and constantly more far-reaching intervention in human and non-human nature. While the growing technological possibilities of regulating and controlling life processes reveal the cultural contingency and the social construction of ostensibly objective and inalterable facts of nature, at the same time, a reverse tendency toward renaturalization and closure has become evident that understands biological processes as the uncircumventable basis and normative guideline for individual and collective action. On the one hand, a destabilization and flexibilization of traditional body images, gender stereotypes, and concepts of the family can be detected, while, on the other hand, “traditional” notions of, for example, the division of work based on a gender hierarchy are claimed which point toward a biological reality whose legitimacy and features can supposedly be represented by way of scientific knowledge (cf. Fausto-Sterling 2000; Franklin 2000; Bertilsson 2003; Wehling/Viehöver/Keller/Lau 2007).

The research area addresses this tension-filled constellation without reducing it to a naturalizing perspective or a sociocentric position. The nature of the body and external nature are viewed neither as biological-physical facts nor as social constructions and cultural schemes, but investigated as something that is grappling with social processes and actively affecting them (Benton 1991; Dickens 2004; Harbers 2005; Becker/Jahn 2006; Jasanoff 2006).

The research and qualification projects to be dealt with within the scope of this research area enable tracing the dynamics and the transition points of the process of opening and closure, flexibilization and fixation. Emphasis is placed on the analysis of the tension-filled juxtaposition and opposition of denaturalization and renaturalization, which—according to our basic assumption—is characteristic for the social genesis and appropriation of bioscientific knowledge.