Conclusion. Coproducing Genomics or Why We Need to Take the Mundane Seriously

Drawing from insights and contributions of the book, the conclusion reframes genomics through the lens of the mundane, emphasizing its normalization and integration into everyday life. Moving beyond the early promises of a genomic revolution, the text argues that genomics now operates through ordinary routines, infrastructures, and affective engagements rather than spectacular breakthroughs. The concept of the mundane serves to tackle and analyse both as a process—capturing how genomic technologies become embedded in parenting, reproduction, healthcare, forensics, and identity-making—and as an analytic lens to interrogate their social, ethical, and political consequences. As genomics becomes banal, its power is not diminished but redistributed: shaping intimate decisions, reinforcing norms, and generating new forms of governance and inequality. This volume highlights five dimensions of the mundane—ordinary, routinary, institutional, modest, and leaky—revealing how genomic practices are co-produced through negotiation, interpretation, and resistance. By attending to overlooked actors, infrastructures, and everyday labour, the mundane displaces triumphalist narratives and foregrounds complexity, contradiction, and situatedness. Ultimately, this perspective enables a critical understanding of genomics as a social process—incremental, relational, and deeply embedded—while inviting more ethically and politically responsive approaches to its future.