This ESRC-funded seminar series on Vital Geographies will consider the way the politics of life both incorporate and are unsettled by geographical issues. The cultural and technological determinants that shape the beginning of life, the end of life, and the length of life are profoundly geographical. There are important questions that need to be asked about this. How, in thinking about the length of life, for example, the lottery of place-of-birth has implications for theories of justice. Since place of birth is the primary determinant of life expectancy, it could be argued that an unearned advantage exists that is perhaps even more profound than the class-based issues of wealth inheritance that concerned Rawls. Likewise, to think broadly about the beginning of life, one might consider issues around poverty and the life chances of under-weight babies and how this intersects with any reproductive choices that might, or might not, be posed. Finally, if we think about the end of life, there would seem to be very many ways that social and geographical inequalities might be factored into the variously political and technological means by which life itself may be withheld.

In bringing together an interdisciplinary set of scholars this series aims to explore the complexity of ways in which the biological commons of human life is policed by technologies (variously social and material); through the political reckoning of such vital discourses as bioethics; in the sorts of attempts to regulate vitality through space that immigration policies, incarceration and the outsourcing of clinical trials pose; through to more diffuse but no less relevant conditions for health and welfare asserted by the unfair trade of global debt recovery programmes - programmes which are constitutive of contemporary global vital orders but which have their genesis in political-economies past. In doing so we hope to further two specific aims: first, to expand the critique of the politics of life itself to incorporate this take up of human vitality by states and capital themselves, and second, to assess whether such an analysis of life chances might itself provide a valid basis for a critique of the capitalist world economy. With respect to AIDS, for example, capitalist logics set constraints on global solidarity with the consequence that millions will die early and millions more will live on the uncertain extension of affordable drugs. Such questions of geographical limits need to be asked alongside the questions of technological possibilities that have tended to be emphasised to date.

Properly thought through, such issues of vital geography ought to make an important contribution to the wealth of work on new medical technologies as they raise existential questions about the meaning of life itself. We thus hope to develop an analytical appreciation of how the novelty of developments in the life sciences takes place in dialogue with persistent but mundane inequalities. There are pressing reasons to do so. When the War on Terror produces the figure of biosecurity and public health gets erased in favour of security discourses, our analyses of the politics of a variously technologically, socially and geographically-mediated life need to be up to the task of responding.