Introduction. Mundane Genomics: An Analytical Reorientation

This volume introduces the concept of mundane genomics to capture the normalization and routinization of genomic technologies in everyday life. Moving beyond the early promises of a “genomic revolution,” the introduction discusses how DNA has shifted from a symbol of scientific exceptionalism to a dispersed, ordinary element embedded in social, cultural, and institutional practices. Genomics now permeates diverse domains—assisted reproduction, preventive medicine, direct-to-consumer testing, forensics, and frontier omics—through infrastructures, routines, and ethical framings that render it simultaneously banal and consequential. Drawing on feminist theory, science and technology studies, and anthropology, the book suggests that attending to the mundane reveals hidden labor, infrastructural frictions, and ethical invisibility that shape genomic governance. Rather than a radical rupture, genomics emerges as a modest, situated, and leaky practice—entangled with kinship, care, market logics, and biopolitical strategies. This analytical reorientation foregrounds the everyday negotiations, selective ignorances, and semantic multiplicities through which genomic knowledge is domesticated, resisted, and reinterpreted. By tracing these processes across empirical cases, the volume offers a nuanced yet necessary framework for understanding genomics as a distinctive yet non-exceptional domain of contemporary technoscience.