RELI-GENE: Governing Health, Family and Religion: The Biopolitics of Genetic Counselling and Religious Family Formations

RELI-GENE is an interdisciplinary project funded by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council (ERC-2024-COG no. 101171587). 

It examines how genetic testing and reproductive technologies shape family formations, kinships and belongings within close-knit religious minorities that feel a form of existential threat because of perceived marginalisation, discrimination or persecution. 

These communities often engage in consanguineous and endogamous marriage practices as a means of preserving heritage and lineage. Yet, with advances in biomedicine, individuals find themselves embedded within a wide spectrum of choices and dilemmas about their own reproductive futures. Individual decision-making is interwoven with community expectations and obligations to preserve religious and familial continuity.  

States, on the other hand, increasingly intervene in these intimate matters. Across Europe and the Middle East, governments regulate marriage practices and promote genetic screening to manage public health and demographic concerns. Norway, for example, has recently prohibited marriages between close relatives, with similar legislative and political debates in several other European countries. In the Middle East, policymakers have taken more directive approaches by promoting and in some cases mandating premarital genetic screening in response to consanguineous and endogamous marriage practices. 

RELI-GENE examines the complex negotiations between biomedical governance, religious authorities, communal expectations and personal beliefs, asking how genetic knowledge reshapes what it means to belong to a religion, a family and a nation. 

RELI-GENE develops a new conceptual model for studying genetic counselling and reproductive governance. Rather than focusing only on state biopolitics or public health interventions, RELI-GENE examines how religious minorities interpret, adapt and, sometimes, resist these measures through their own religio-cultural belief systems and transnational networks. 

The project focuses on the following communities and localities:

• Ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities under the Israeli healthcare system and their transnational links to communities in the UK and the US.
• Palestinians of various religious and minority backgrounds living under Israeli, Swedish and German healthcare systems.
• Emirati Muslims in the UAE and their transnational links to the UK.
• Syrian and Iraqi communities of various religious backgrounds in Germany and Sweden.

RELI-GENE integrates multiple methods to bridge disciplines and various forms of knowledge production: 

• Document and discourse analysis of policy texts, media representations and visual or audio material on marriage regulation and health governance.
• Qualitative interviews with policy makers, healthcare providers, religious leaders and community members, alongside ethnographic observations of healing and counselling practices.
• Participatory arts-based methods and immersive technologies (including virtual reality and augmented reality) to both collect and disseminate data. 

What distinguishes RELI-GENE is its transnational and comparative scope and its focus on communities that navigate between state regulations, religious authorities, socio-cultural expectations and biomedical technologies. It examines how individuals engage with genetic knowledge not only as medical information but also as a marker of religious obligation, moral duty, lineage and belonging. 

The project combines intersectional, biopolitical and governmentality frameworks with participatory and digital methodologies. By doing so, RELI-GENE offers a new model for studying and understanding the governance of life itself. It illustrates how genetic knowledge, religious morality and political agendas shape people’s understanding of personhood and what it means to live as a healthy, moral and responsible individual within a religious community.