Janelle Lamoreaux

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Scholarly Contributions

Books

• Gibbon, S., Prainsack, B., Hilgartner, S., & Lamoreaux, J. (2018). Routledge handbook of genomics, health and society. Taylor and Francis. doi:10.4324/9781315451695
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  The Handbook provides an essential resource at the interface of Genomics, Health and Society, and forms a crucial research tool for both new students and established scholars across biomedicine and social sciences. Building from and extending the first Routledge Handbook of Genetics and Society, the book offers a comprehensive introduction to pivotal themes within the field, an overview of the current state of the art knowledge on genomics, science and society, and an outline of emerging areas of research. Key themes addressed include the way genomic based DNA technologies have become incorporated into diverse arenas of clinical practice and research whilst also extending beyond the clinic; the role of genomics in contemporary ‘bioeconomies’; how challenges in the governance of medical genomics can both reconfigure and stabilise regulatory processes and jurisdictional boundaries; how questions of diversity and justice are situated across different national and transnational terrains of genomic research; and how genomics informs - and is shaped by - developments in fields such as epigenetics, synthetic biology, stem cell, microbial and animal model research. Presenting cutting edge research from leading social science scholars, the Handbook provides a unique and important contribution to the field. It brings a rich and varied cross disciplinary social science perspective that engages with both the history and contemporary context of genomics and ‘post-genomics’, and considers the now global and transnational terrain in which these developments are unfolding.

Chapters

• Lamoreaux, J., & Wahlberg, A. (2022). Sperm. In An Anthropogenic Table of Elements: Experiments in the Fundamental.. University of Toronto Press. doi:10.3138/9781487563585-013
• Lamoreaux, J. (2018). Gendered Bioeconomies. In Handbook of Genetics and Society. Routledge.

Journals/Publications

• Lamoreaux, J. (2025). Reservoirs of endangerment. History and Technology, 40(Issue). doi:10.1080/07341512.2025.2479894
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  Reservoirs, as sites of storage, can carve out space for things to stay that may otherwise depart. As such, reservoirs become important at a moment when climate change and the depletion of habitats has led to the endangerment of many of Earth’s species. Sometimes, however, reservoirs can actually lead to further endangerment, blocking or curtailing movement through habitats or once unimpeded flows. This two-part essay describes how reservoirs today are both built and destroyed in the name of biodiversity and species survival through two examples. Through the first example of the Lunar Ark, I discuss how reservoirs can act as spaces in which the present is stored to protect the potential future. Here, reservoirs provide an answer for some looking to conserve species through safeguarding the entities necessary for their reproduction. Through the second example of Washington State’s Northwestern Lake and discussion of the removal of Condit Dam, I discuss how reservoirs can also be spaces where people cling to the more recent past in an effort to temporarily forego longer histories and potential futures of both humans and non-humans.
• Lamoreaux, J. (2023). Weighing the future: Race, science, and pregnancy trials in the postgenomic era By NataliValdez. Oakland: University of California Press, 2021. 284 pp.. American Ethnologist, 50(3), 532-533. doi:10.1111/amet.13176
• Lamoreaux, J. (2022). Beyond the Egg and the Sperm?: How Science Has Revised a Romance through Reproductomics. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 47(6), 1180-1204. doi:10.1177/01622439221123943
• Lamoreaux, J. (2021). “Passing Down Pollution”: (Inter)generational Toxicology and (Epi)genetic Environmental Health. Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 35(4), 529-546. doi:10.1111/maq.12679
• Lamoreaux, J., & Dow, K. (2020). Situated Kinmaking and the Population “Problem”. Environmental Humanities, 12(2), 475-491. doi:10.1215/22011919-8623230
• Lamoreaux, J. (2019). Swimming in poison: Reimagining endocrine disruption through China’s environmental hormones. Cross-Currents, 8(Issue 1). doi:10.1353/ach.2019.0008
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  This article analyzes media responses to a 2010 Greenpeace China report titled Swimming in Poison. Among other alarming data, the report states that fish from collection points along the Yangtze River showed elevated levels of harmful “environmental hormones” (huanjing jisu), also referred to as endocrine-disrupting chemicals (EDCs). Scholars have critiqued EDC science and activism for its heteronormative pathologizing of intersexuality, nonreproductive sexual activity, and impaired fertility, drawing attention to the “sex panic” at work in EDC discourse. This article shows that such sex panic is neither necessary nor universal in anxieties surrounding EDCs. Unlike media responses to EDC events in Europe and North America, Chinese news articles that followed the report did not focus on anxieties surrounding sexual transgression. Instead, media reactions focused on food safety, industrial capitalism, and the ecological scope of pollution. Based on this analysis, the author argues that the disruptive quality and analytic potential of China’s environmental hormones has less to do with a defense of sexual purity or bodily integrity, and more to do with acknowledging the depths to which human and nonhuman bodies in today’s China are suffused with the sometimes toxic social, economic, political, and chemical environments in which people eat, grow, and live.
• Lamoreaux, J. (2016). WHAT IF THE ENVIRONMENT IS A PERSON? Lineages of Epigenetic Science in a Toxic China. Cultural Anthropology, 31(2). doi:10.14506/ca31.2.03
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  Through an ethnographic portrayal of the research on and treatment of congenital disorders in China, in this article I suggest that epigenetic research has the potential not only to exaggerate maternal blame but also to deindividualize ideas of maternal and parental responsibility. When a pregnant woman and the generations that produced her are understood through epigenetic studies as the environmental contexts of another person, responsibility has the potential to be reimagined as existing in relations and configurations that move beyond individualized understandings of personhood. Moreover, I argue that epigenetic models of development and inheritance at work in toxicological studies in China, and in the postgenomic embrace of complexity more generally, strongly resonate with existing social scientific models of Chinese life. Toxicologists conducting epigenetic research in China today reconfigure preexisting models of transgenerational, biosocial relationality to reassert a sense of social, environmental, and intergenerational connectivity in a moment of increasing individualization and chemical toxicity.