Discover ‘Hematopolitics’
Blood offers a uniquely valuable lens through which to understand contemporary social relationships due to its powerful symbolic associations and its fundamental role in healthcare. Hematopolitics is an exciting new research project which posits blood donation as a privileged site for comprehending social transformation in diversifying and ageing societies that struggle to meet rising demands for transfusions.
Focusing on Japan and South Korea, where blood has strong symbolic power in relation to kinship, nationhood, and pollution, the Hematopolitics project interrogates how national identity and social relationships are imagined and contested through blood donation. This extends the existing parameters of social analyses of blood donation, which have tended to focus on altruism and social solidarity. Instead of limiting its inquiry to individuals’ motivations to donate blood or the strong bond this creates, our project asks how blood donation conjures up concepts of social boundaries around implicit understandings of who should donate to whom and why. By employing a new framework – ‘hematopolitics’ – our research highlights the mundane processes through which these boundaries are drawn and challenged by blood donors, health professionals, patients, and wider publics. In doing so, it aims to shed light on the micropolitical contestations over belonging to imagined and embodied collectives around shared pools of blood.
The Hematopolitics framework borrows its inspiration from a range of notable preceding works on the politics of blood in anthropology and its cognate fields. These include Jennifer Robertson’s work on “hemato-nationalism” in Japan that considers blood as “an active agent responsible for catalyzing an ethos, or a national-cultural identity”; Thomas Strong’s notion of “vital publics” as “embodied associations” among strangers “elicited through the generalized exchange of blood”; Jacob Copeman and Dwaipayan Banerjee’s exposition of “political hematology” that explores how “blood slips between metaphor and literal medium of political transactions – congealing ideology in material forms”. Hematopolitics draws on these insights to further examine blood’s role in reconfiguring sociopolitical orders and relationalities. Blood’s evocative power can be mobilised to reinforce blood-based identities around categories of nationhood, race/ethnicity, and kinship at times, while also opening up transformative moments to challenge and alter these categories.
In addition to research, this project implements a number of public engagement activities working with partner organizations and collaborators across the UK, Korea and Japan (see partners’ page). This project is currently funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (2023-25) and the University of Leeds (2021-25) and builds on previous projects funded by the Wellcome Trust (2021-23) and the White Rose University Consortium (2021-23). Associated researcher Sarah Chadwick’s collaborative doctoral project with the Thackray Museum of Medicine is funded by the White Rose College of the Arts & Humanities (WroCAH).