Post-genomic scientific research practices are shifting conceptualizations of the relationships between bodies & environments over human lifetimes and generations (Lappé & Landecker 2015; Darling et al. 2016). Epigenetics has recently generated a set of frameworks & methods for linking environmental & social exposures to molecular effects. Ruth Müller and Martha Kenney are investigating how the narratives about early life adversity coming out of environmental epigenetics circulate in the life sciences and in wider publics (Kenney & Müller, 2017).

In their recent article “Of Rats and Women: Narratives of Motherhood in Environmental Epigenetics,” they identify troubling trends in how the results of these experiments are narrated, specifically how trauma and early life adversity are often framed as causing potentially-irreversible life-long damage. See more here.