Peer-Reviewed Journal Details
Mandatory Fields
Fitzgerald D.;Hinterberger A.;Narayan J.;Williams R.
2020
November
Sociological Review
Brexit as heredity redux: Imperialism, biomedicine and the NHS in Britain
Validated
WOS: 24 ()
Optional Fields
biomedicine Brexit heredity migration NHS racial nationalism racism
68
6
1161
1178
What is the relationship between Brexit and biomedicine? Here we investigate the Vote Leave official campaign slogan ‘We send the EU £350 million a week. Let’s fund our NHS instead’ in order to shed new light on the nationalist stakes of Brexit. We argue that the Brexit referendum campaign must be situated within biomedical policy and practice in Britain. We propose a re-thinking of Brexit through a cultural politics of heredity to capture how biomedicine is structured around genetic understandings of ancestry and health, along with the forms of racial inheritance that structure the state and its welfare system. We explore this in three domains: the NHS and health tourism, data sharing policies between the NHS and the Home Office, and the NHS as an imperially resourced public service. Looking beyond the Brexit referendum campaign, we argue for renewed sociological attention to the relationships between racism, biology, health and inheritance in British society.
0038-0261
10.1177/0038026120914177
Grant Details