ACCEPTED OPEN PANELS–Medicine and Healthcare

6. AMR in Globalized Economies: Knowledge, Regulation, Markets

Henri Boullier, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine; Nicolas Fortané, INRA – IRISSO, Université Paris-Dauphine

Over recent years, antimicrobial resistance (AMR) has become a central global health issue, as well as a stimulating object of inquiry for STS scholars. The development of resistant bacteria impacts our possible futures in a world deprived of (working) antibiotics and raises a lot of questions about contemporary healthcare and food systems, innovation and circulation of medicines, medical and veterinary practices in a globalized world. This panel wants to bring together scholars studying AMR and proposes to follow three lines of research:

(1) by focusing on the controversies that have emerged in and structured the field of AMR, which often take the form of attempts to draw a line between medical and veterinary uses (e.g. with the notion of “critically important antimicrobials”) or to put the blame on end-users’ shoulders (e.g. with the concept of “antimicrobial stewardship”);

(2) by investigating the policies and expertise that have been set up to mitigate AMR risks (national and regional plans, surveillance and monitoring systems, etc.), in particular those promoted by prominent international organizations which tend to produce knowledge without taking local specificities into account (e.g. policies framed through the northern concern of fighting antibiotic “excess” while “access” remains the major issue for southern countries);

(3) by studying circulation of antibiotics in a globalized world, through, for instance, the trade of animal products (basic standards or “antibiotic-free”) or industry strategies on pharmaceutical markets in the North and South (e.g. regarding the articulation of formal and informal distribution channels or the mechanisms of price formation).

Contact: h.boullier@gmail.com

Keywords: AMR, antibiotics, expertise, public health, pharmaceutical industry

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

9. Articulating and Relating to Different Forms of the Good in Bad Situations

Jeannette Pols, Amsterdam UMC/University of Amsterdam; Sonja Jerak-Zuiderent, Amsterdam University Medical Centers; Jonna Brenninkmeijer, Amsterdam UMC; Maartje Hoogsteyns, Amsterdam UMC; Stephanie Meirmans, Amsterdam UMC; Annemarie van Hout, Hogeschool W

Unsafe healthcare, climate disasters, migration threats, scientific misconduct – all tend to steer our focus towards fear and critical analyses of things that are overwhelmingly and singularly bad. With our present day challenges requiring urgent action, how to not get carried away by the urgency to act? How not to overlook everyday, situated efforts of forms of the good already going on and ways in which we can articulate the good in its different guises? What would happen when we analyse ‘wicked problems’ by picking out the forms of goodness and badness that are inscribed in such calls for alarm? And even more intriguing: what good might these challenges also bring?

In this panel we explore how forms of the good are constantly shaped and articulated by the people and things we study, and also by ourselves as researchers. What imaginations and repertoires for acting and doing research can such articulations open up? How does it transform understandings of how we might act, and in what terms could this be labelled as ‘good’? And how difficult is it to act or not to act with forms of the good? How can empirical ethics be a way to tell a different story than the stories of overwhelming alarm for problems that clearly exceed individual agency?

We welcome contributions that focus on good care, good (environmental) living, good education or good science, and also explicitly welcome contributions from other empirical domains and ‘overwhelming’ problems.

Contact: s.jerak-zuiderent@amsterdamumc.nl

Keywords: Forms of the good, Empirical Ethics, Care

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Other

16. Building digital bioethics: Transformations in theory and applied practice

Mustafa Ibraheem Hussain, University of California Irvine; Victoria Neumann, Lancaster University; Stephen Molldrem, University of California, Irvine

Technologies that facilitate the collection and use of electronic health data have increasingly become the tools used to diagnose conditions and administer services. Digital transformations are at the centre of scholarly critiques of power imbalances in healthcare, partly because developments in digital biomedicine have been accompanied by data misuse scandals and genuinely new bioethical problems. Just as scientific advancements and concomitant human rights violations in clinical research and practice led to the development of bioethics in the 20th century, the turn toward the digital in healthcare is giving rise to new transdisciplinary trends in the theory and practice of contemporary bioethics (e.g. Klugman et al., 2018).

In this open panel, we aspire to deepen conversations between theoretical and applied approaches in bioethics, and call for contributions aimed at “building digital bioethics.” Inspired by the work of critical bioethicists (see “bioethics of the oppressed” by Guta et al., 2018 and Benjamin, 2016), we solicit contributions in keeping with the STS commitment to centering  subaltern perspectives, and to bioethics’ grounding principles of respect for persons, beneficence, and justice (Belmont Report, 1976). How can emancipation and self-determination become possible in an area in which individual control is often reduced to check-box “consent”? Who is the digital bioethicist? What are digital bioethics? We welcome submissions including, but not limited to, the following:

Digital bioethical imaginaries and controversies

Feminist, decolonial, anti-racist, and queer positions in bioethics

The ethics of consent and data (re-use)

Governing digital biomedicine

Counter-hegemonic practices

Organizational transformation

The assetization of health data

Contact: mihussai@uci.edu

Keywords: Bioethics, Data, Governance, Health, Biomedicine

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Big Data

Governance and Public Policy

33. Death Itself: Technology, Ethics, and Ambiguity

Dylan Thomas Lott, Center for Healthy Minds/University of Wisconsin-Madison; Amanda van Beinum, Carleton University

Modernity in the time of the Anthropocene is marked by a growing, mutating tension between life and death. Even as scientists discover new ways to revive and sustain ex-vivo brains, mass extinctions and life-limiting disasters accelerate. A key engagement of STS research has been to understand rapidly mutating conceptions of “life itself,” mediated through the technological advances of genetic discoveries, cloning, and electronic health records. In this panel we wish to push these insights further to consider how death has changed as a result. How have these shifting conceptions of life itself also affected what it means to die? How can we understand ethics and responsibility in spaces where the very possibility of finite endings has become at once unclear and imminent? 

This panel invites papers that employ STS methodologies to critically examine who (or what) can die, and how (and where) this becomes possible in the complex contexts of modern life. We especially invite investigations that integrate an ethical perspective into this critical work that seeks not only to explore the material aspects of death, dying, and endings, but also to creatively imagine how we might make sense of ambiguous or absolute ends. We also encourage papers exploring the material and ethical aspects of what it means to study this multiplicity of endings from an STS perspective, including those that imagine new, reflexive methodologies for doing so.

Contact: amanda.vanbeinum@carleton.ca

Keywords: death, dying, ethics, end of life, life support technologies

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

36. Defining the Patient in Biomedicine Today

Gareth A. F. Edel, New Jersey Institute of Technology

Addressing the state of biomedicalization and imagining its future this panel asks: “What are patients today?”

“Patient” is a subjective role – they are a subject of Foucaldian control, an unknowing research participant, a resource for business, a self-advocate, and the central component of the clinical encounter that stands as a metonym for all of medicine. The figure of the patient has been repeatedly reimagined as traditional medical roles and biomedicine itself change.

In the last ten years, shifts in global political economy, the rise of nationalist movements, and ongoing neoliberal governance reformations are changing the way biomedical practices are viewed and practiced around the world. Tomorrow’s patient seen through the lens of today’s politics is a consumer purchasing “personalized” medicine like any commodity. However that patient’s information is itself a commodity for the Big Data field, rendering them a product and a research subject. Are traditional categories distinguishing ‘patients’ and ‘research subjects’ still correct in a world where health and behavioral data is collected and used in research on Facebook, treatment records and information are increasingly produced intentionally as subjects of research and as people’s healthcare data is monetized, sold, and traded?

While clinical encounters represent a touchstone element of medicine, within STS we often focus on the actions of doctors and expertise within medical systems while patients remain implicated actors or victims. This panel instead directs discussion towards the patient, and requests submission of papers that center the patient as a topic of negotiation and ongoing redefinition.

Contact: garethedel@gmail.com

Keywords: Biomedicine, Patient, Clinical Encounter, Commodification, Neoliberalism

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

39. Digital Phenotyping –  Unpacking Intelligent Machines For Deep Medicine And A New Public Health

Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh; Ger Wackers, UiT The Arctic University of Norway

Digital phenotyping has become a popular practice in the world of data-driven health research. It has developed into a tool to syphon structured health data from online populations. As a practice, it is hailed to refine the classification and understanding of psychiatric, infectious and chronic conditions. A new phenomics is developed to match the genomics of previous years and close the gap between the genotype and phenotype. In the widest sense, digital phenotyping has become identified with a medical knowledge production entirely based on the analysis of digital borne data, providing new ways of knowing disease with more granular insights from digital data. Digital phenotyping schizophrenia, dementia, the flu or Parkinson’s disease is supposed to overcome vague and unstructured clinical observations and to offer new, highly standardised pathways towards a complete symptomatology. Conceptually, the digital phenotype has been shaped with reference to Dawkins’ elaborations on the ‘extended phenotype’ while its practices are strongly aligned with the ‘deep medicine’ movement, which seeks to build and to exploit vast datasets of different kinds to achieve novel insight into drivers of disease.

Underlying this new conceptual tool are a series of imaginaries that we like to unpack in this panel. We invite contributions that engage the impact of digital phenotyping in mental health research, that reconstruct historical genealogies of such infrastructures and which engage the phantasies of total insight, vast understanding and deep comprehension build into this budding tool at the bleeding edge of digital medical research.

Contact: ger.wackers@uit.no

Keywords: Digital phenotyping, deep medicine, public health, digital epidemiology

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Big Data

48. Disgust

Salla Sariola, University of Helsinki; Luisa Reis de Castro, Massachusetts Institute for Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

A series of recent scientific and technological innovations have brought about changes over what, in popular cultures, have been distinctly categorized as objects of disgust. The current ecological crises call for novel solutions that sometimes are counter-intuitive to these cultural affects associated with cleanliness and what ‘is disgusting’.  Fecal transplantation to counter gut dysbiosis, edible insects as sustainable alternatives to animal protein, mosquitoes as helpful vectors in global health interventions against dengue and malaria, and critters thriving in polluted environments are but a few examples demonstrating changes to notions of purity and danger as they manifest in the notion of disgust.

In this panel, we invite papers that reflect on disgust as a cultural specific, visceral response,  with historical attachment to ideas of impurity and pathogenicity as well as how these notions might be reversed in new technoscientific practices. By sidelining human cognitive responses to disgust, we instead want to query the processes by which ‘disgusting’ is transmorphed into acceptable, normalized, or even desirable outcomes through technoscientific endeavours. How are notions of disgust reconfigured and to what ends? What kinds of novel multi-species entanglements are drawn in these practices? What kind of new practices do these reimaginations make possible? How do scientific understandings of ‘disgusting’ non-humans intra-act with our ingrained affective experiences of them? Enquiring the changing meanings of disgust enables deeper understanding about the creativity with which new solutions are crafted during extreme times.

Contact: salla.sariola@helsinki.fi

Keywords: disgust, multi-species, visceral, affect, technoscience

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Food and Agriculture

49. Disrupting Biomedicine: The Politics and Practice of Open Source and Biohacked Drugs and Devices

Colleen Lanier-Christensen, Harvard University; Nicole Foti, University of California, San Francisco

Frustrated with the existing landscape of drug and medical device development—including its high costs, top-down research and development processes, and proprietary, non-interoperable systems—grassroots efforts have emerged that counter dominant structures and practices in the production and use of biomedical knowledge. Biohackers, DIY biologists, medical device modifiers, and open source pharmaceutical and medical hardware initiatives are examples of such burgeoning critiques and reactions. Rather than submit their bodies to clinically defined models of patienthood and government-regulated commercial products, these individuals strive to reshape biomedical science and technology to address systemic failures, or to fit their wills. These projects—such as developing open source estrogen, insulin, epi-pens, prosthetics, and automated insulin delivery systems— aim to disrupt the hierarchical structure of traditional healthcare systems and challenge the role of professionalized, credentialed experts in determining medical care.

This panel seeks to explore open source, DIY, and hacking practices—past and present—across diverse health conditions and diseases, therapeutics, regulatory spaces, and healthcare systems. We invite contributions exploring these practices’ modes of resistance, as well as their opportunities, barriers, and limitations. Papers might examine, for example, how such projects build on or depart from more traditional patient advocacy and medical social movements; the different forms of risks, conceptions of empowerment, and promissory claims entailed; critical forms of knowledge production; or the shifting socio-technical landscape enabling these developments (e.g., smartphones, 3D-printing, predictive algorithms, open software, novel hardware tools). The diabetes space is especially rich for such inquiries; scholars working in this area are encouraged to contribute.

Contact: colleenlanier@fas.harvard.edu

Keywords: Biohacking, biomedicine, social movements, pharmaceuticals, medical devices

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

52. Dying at the Margins: Emerging Material-Discursive Perspectives on Death and Dying

Philip R Olson, Virginia Tech; Natashe Lemos Dekker, University of Amsterdam; Jesse Peterson, KTH Stockholm

This session seeks to explore socio-ecological networks of the dying and dead that exist at the margins. The borders between life and death are sometimes unclear. Death may get interrupted, delayed, or come undone, disrupting culturally shared norms and expectations surrounding death and dying. We acknowledge such disruptions as material and discursive; that is, bodies, minds, geographies, stories, technologies, and more act to challenge human perspectives on how people, animals, plants, or things ought to die and where and how the dead ought to be laid to rest. Suddenly, what seemed coherent no longer is, in the breakdown or dissolution of that which is dying but also in the way one orders worlds and afterworlds.

This session aims to identify and develop ways to explore and establish connections between dying and death from perspectives that refute a nature/culture binary—to ask questions such as: What boundary work takes place to construct and maintain the categories of alive, not-alive, dead, dying, and undead for places, objects, and beings? How do states and processes of acquiescing to, existing in between, manipulating, or overcoming life and/or death affect normative assumptions about dying and death? What might it mean to reconfigure human understanding of death to a more ecological frame that accommodates more-than-human lives and/or deep time? How might the memories, spirits, or spiritualities related to the dead and dying limit, expand, or explode a material-discursive frame? How do such challenges alter ethical approaches or values attached to dying and death?

Contact: prolson@vt.edu

Keywords: Death and Dying, Environment, Vital Boundaries, Worlds and Afterworlds, Ethics and Policy

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

53. Editing future life and biotechnological utopias/ Bio-political materialization and potentialities of CRISPRcas9

Eva Slesingerova, Masaryk university

We are inhabiting multiple bio-political potentialities, futures echoing ideas of life-as-it-could-be. This panel analyzes biotechnological not-only-human networks, their utopian and dystopian potentialities in the context of recombinant DNA technologies. For fifty years, assorted technologies for human genome editing and recombinant DNA have been used. The current applications of genome editing on human germlines have provoked significant attention and raised a number of ethical and legal questions as well. Specifically considering CRISPR/Cas 9 technology, the rhetoric about revolution, new promises, new breakpoints for humankind, also fears and concerns have emerged recently. Speaking about CRISPR/Cas9 and the media frenzy, anthropologist Kirksey (2016) referred to “emergent 21st century biotechnology dreams,” noting that “science fictions and fantasies are quickly becoming facts with CRISPR” which he described as “a gene editing technology that is opening up new horizons for the human species.” Miscellaneous futurities, as material-semiotic reconfigurations, biotechnological utopias, media hypes, are present in the topics of the current genome editing technologies. We meet to bring together various views on questions like:

–              What kinds of biotechnological utopias, spaces of hope and hype, visions, also fears and concerns we face today in the context of human genome editing technologies?

–              Which social and political issues are mirrored and created by these technologies? How they stratify groups of potential patients?

–              What modes of de/politization are involved in the context of editing genome technologies? What kinds of new social control, hierarchies, exclusion, domination but also care, social inclusion can genome editing technologies help accomplish?

Contact: eslesi@fss.muni.cz

Keywords: editing genome, biotechnological utopias, techno-fantasies, biopolitics, CRISPR-Cas9

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

55. Engaging Health Activism, Sexual Politics and STS

Lisa Lindén, Departement of Sociology and Work Science, University of Gothenburg; Emily Jay Nicholls, Goldsmiths University of London

The relationship between activism, biomedicine and sexual politics has been a focus in STS since Steven Epstein’s 1996 book Impure Science: AIDS Activism and The Politics of Knowledge. In focusing on how patients, citizens and organisations mobilise to transform biomedicine and healthcare, STS has taken a particular focus on public/expert entanglements, such as how health advocacy groups collaborate with healthcare professionals and mobilise citizens’ experiences to influence health practice (Akrich et al. 2014).

In this panel we want to combine this focus on health activism with recent calls to address the possibilities afforded by a greater attention to pleasure and to sexual bodies in STS (Race 2019). Here we also include an attention to the ways sex and sexuality are mobilised in political engagements with health and illness. As digital technologies open new possibilities for doing politics, sex and intimacy, and uncertain and turbulent times raise new problems for health programming and notions of expertise, we hope to explore the analytical generativity of doing STS research at the intersection of sex, sexuality, health and activism.

We welcome contributions that engage with ‘health activism and sexual politics’ in various ways, and from a range of empirical areas. This might include:

• Public/expert entanglements
• Sexual bodies, affect and pleasure
• The enactment of ‘biosexual citizenship’ (Epstein 2018) in health activism
• Continuities and discontinuities: troubled pasts (Murphy 2012) and possible futures
• Health activism and LGBTQ movements (Roberts & Cronshaw 2017)
• Categorisations, standards, risk and politics of (sexual) inclusion
• Engagements with Queer Theory

Contact: lisa.linden@gu.se

Keywords: sex, sexuality, health, activism, biomedicine

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

57. Environmentalities of Health Security

Carolin Mezes, Philipps-University Marburg; Sven Opitz, Philipps-University Marburg

Discourses of Global Health Security are saturated with buzzwords like “holism”, “comprehensive approaches”, or “systems thinking”, and increasingly push concepts that make a strong case about the ecological and environmental aspects of health, like “Planetary Health” or “One Health”. Concerns about the circulation of antibiotics through sewage systems and soils, the proliferation of vector populations due to rising temperatures, or the conveyance of “invasive species” through logistical infrastructures are just some cases that point to what we observe as a rearticulation of health threats in environmental terms. In our panel we would firstly like to deepen the understanding of such a (re-)actualized environmental orientation, and secondly do so by investigating how it corresponds with transformations of the security apparatus designed to tackle health crises. We suggest focusing on the governmental, technical and scientific means that address disease emergencies as a matter of ecology. Correspondingly, we invite papers to address the following questions: How do techno-political devices and legal protocols transcribe the changing spatio-temporal constitution of disease into an administrative topology? What calculative machineries, such as seemingly trivial paperwork technologies, sensing devices or computer simulations draw together epidemic environments and enact ecological concerns for health security? What techno-scientific interventions, from outbreak research on vaccines, over epidemiological sentinel systems to microbial engineering, are put to the field? Using these questions for investigating a broad range of phenomena, we hope to clarify whether and how contemporary apparatuses of health security intertwine with an ecosystem view on disease.

Contact: carolin.mezes@uni-marburg.de

Keywords: Health Security, Environment, Ecology, Global Assemblages

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Medicine and Healthcare

66. Flows and overflows of personal health data

Mary Ebeling, Drexel University; Tamar Sharon, iHub, Radboud University Nijmegen; Niccolò Tempini, University of Exeter, Egenis

With the explosion of digital technologies that generate massive sets of personal data, from internet networks and big data infrastructures, to wearable devices and sensors, many actors see the analytical potentials of these collections for healthcare and medical research and knowledge production. These data circulate across domains, amongst different types of actors – e.g. academic scientists, corporations, non-profit organizations, individual data subjects, and patient groups – and according to different logics of exchange – e.g. donation, sharing, commodification, and appropriation (Ebeling 2016; Sharon 2018; Tempini and Teira 2019). The promises for the increased circulation of health data are many, including: greater patient empowerment, better population health, and improved interoperability ensuring continuity of care, as well as less health-specific outcomes such as national economic growth. But so are its potential harms, including risks (e.g. privacy breaches), epistemic uncertainties (e.g. questions of data quality and algorithmic transparency), disruptions to existing research standards and protocols (e.g. the conduct of clinical trials), as well as wider concerns regarding the generation of profit based on donated or otherwise publicly available personal health data, and the emergence of new power asymmetries and conflicts of interest between data subjects, data users, and new data intermediaries.

This track invites papers that explore the complex dynamics of the increasing circulation of health data. In particular we seek analyses asking not only how benefits are construed and by whom, and what harms may result, but also what frameworks currently exist for governing flows and what alternative frameworks might be imagined.

Contact: n.tempini@exeter.ac.uk

Keywords: Personal health data, circulation, value, data practices, governance

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

70. Governing Reproductive Bio-economies: Policy Frameworks, Ethics and Economics

Nicky Hudson, De Montfort University; Vincenzo Pavone, Consejo Superior Investigaciones Cientificas (CSIC); Cathy Herbrand, De Montfort University

Reproductive bio-economies, i.e. economies that are built around reproductive tissues, cells and processes, are largely consolidated economies, which have seen considerable growth in terms of treatment cycles, technologies, revenues, actors, and countries. Since the first IVF birth, reproductive bio-economies have expanded to include a range of stakeholders including: clinics, legal firms, donors and surrogates, intermediaries and agencies, gamete and embryo banks, investment funds, research institutions and public health care systems, in a global network worth billions of Euros. Amidst this expansion, questions about the policy and governance of reproductive bio-economies become a matter of considerable interest.

A consideration of regulatory systems that govern reproductive technologies raises questions about how bio-economies emerge within different national and supranational contexts, how and if they challenge existing governance arrangements and how existing or new policy frameworks contribute to their re/shaping. An exploration of the regulation of reproductive bio-economies allows for improved understanding of how “moral regimes directed towards reproductive behaviours and practices are fully entangled with political economic processes” (Morgan & Roberts 2012), and allows consideration to be given to the distribution of actors and affects within different moral frameworks and regulatory formations.

This panel therefore welcomes contributions on:

–              Policy actors, configurations and policy change in the context of reproductive bio-economies

–              Interactions of public policy with private medicine

–              Local/global medical regulation

–              Questions of quality and safety, conflicts of interest and informed consent

–              The regulation of different valuation practices and commercial actors

–              Questions of under or over regulation

Contact: nhudson@dmu.ac.uk

Keywords: IVF, reproductive technologies, tissue economies, bioeconomies

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

75. Health Made Digital

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Danya Glabau, The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

With the rise of digital information technologies, the work of aggregating and exchanging data about our health and habits has become faster and easier. From genetic screening to self-tracking apps, and from electronic medical records to digital data archives, digital technologies are reconfiguring healthcare systems and our notions of health. Following from pioneering STS work on genetic health data (Nelson 2016), precision medicine (Ferryman and Pitcan 2018), and self-tracking devices (Lupton 2016, Schull 2016, Nafus and Neff 2016) on the one hand, and recent work on the “bioeconomy” (Birch 2017, 2018) and speculative bioeconomic futures (Benjamin 2016) on the other, this panel aims to stage generative exploration of what counts as health data in the digital age and how it impacts individuals, patient communities, and practices of public health. In a variety of professional and geographic contexts, we hope to consider questions like: What gets considered health data by regulators, and how does that shape its governance and exchange? How do information systems adapt to the introduction of new forms of “health” data, like social media use or purchasing habits? And what publics and expert communities will, or should, have a say in defining, collecting, and governing new forms of health data? By framing these questions in STS literatures, this panel will illustrate how the discipline’s approach to defining slippery objects like “digital health” and “health information” contributes to understanding health and biomedicine as deeply political matters.

Contact: danya.glabau@gmail.com

Keywords: digital health, health information, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Information, Computing and Media Technology

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

78. Histories And Ecologies of Therapeutic Places

Markus Rudolfi, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Franz Kather, Bielefeld University

A study by Japanese toxicologists reveals the healthy effect of a practice called “forest bathing”. People walk through forests and “shower” in aerosols such as Terpenes that are supposed to reduce stress, to name but one beneficial effect. Framing ecosystems like forests, sea shores or mountains as places that possess therapeutic capacities, medical knowledge rediscovers exogenous factors of human recovery, mirroring the beginnings of clinical therapeutic practices since the 18th century. Early clinical medicine began as a technology marked by concern about the regulation and manipulation of environmental impact.

Conversely, minding the ongoing loss of biodiversity and increase of environmental pollution, the possibility of therapeutic environments such as forest or sea shores is now cast in different lights — where technologically altered environments used to harbour promises of perfection, they now convey much more dire connotations. How does ecosystem change affect the concept of, for example, “forest bathing” if forests are threatened by a changing climate and species diversity?

We propose, therefore, to engage on the history and genealogy of therapeutic places and the technical translation of medical knowledge into technologies and architectures of therapy as a conceptual and epistemological starting point to current rediscoveries of environmental therapy — while minding the transformations and shifts that offset them.

The panel invites historical, empirical and speculative papers that discuss how “therapy” is related to “healthy ecosystems”, therapeutic technologies and infrastructures, and/or the challenge of defining such therapeutic places given the possibly troubling underlying assumptions of what “therapy”, “forest”, or “health” may be.

Contact: m.rudolfi@posteo.de

Keywords: therapy, ecologies, sanatorium, medical history, ecosystem service, naturopathy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

86. Infrastructures of Care: Disability, Autonomy, Inter/Dependencies

Laura Mauldin, University of Connecticut; Helena Moura Fietz, Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul – UFRGS; Emily Rogers, New York University

Engaging with recent STS and feminist technoscience scholars interested in “thinking with care” (Puig de la Bella Casa, 2011;2015;2017; Murphy, 2015), this open panel invites scholars working across disability studies and STS to critically interrogate care and autonomy. Across disability activism and the sociology of science, technology, and medicine is a critique of institutions and institutionalization. Implicit in this research is the virtue of autonomy: one should have agency to direct one’s life, live according to one’s preference, and be held accountable for one’s decisions. Care, however, is often associated with facets of dependency and stigmatized. Nonetheless, recent work in feminist disability studies beckons us to critically examine care (e.g., Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), and STS scholars have noted that the notion of “patient autonomy” is itself determined by upstream decision-making and care infrastructures (Mol 2008). The goal of this panel is to consider what STS and disability studies might gain from taking up care as an infrastructure that does not render “autonomy” as a static virtue, but instead suggests a shifting and dynamic sociotechnical terrain. What emerging worlds flourish within such socitechnical systems of care? We invite case studies on how infrastructures transform care relations, altering configurations of autonomy and/or inter/dependency in the process, in a variety of cultural contexts. What do we mean when we talk about autonomy in the context of sociotechnical systems of care?  How does an STS perspective trouble notions of care taken up in feminist scholarship and/or disability studies?

Contact: laura.mauldin@gmail.com

Keywords: disability, care, interdependence, autonomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Other

103. Making Futures by Freezing Life: Ambivalent Temporalities of Cryopreservation Practices

Thomas Lemke; Sara Lafuente-Funes, Institute for Sociology, Goethe University, Frankfurt; Ruzana Liburkina, Goethe-University Frankfurt; Veit Moritz Braun, Goethe University Frankfurt/Main

The preservation of biological matter at extremely low temperatures has gained increasing prominence in medicine, plant breeding, and wildlife conservation over the last decades. Stored at temperatures of down to -196°C, cells and tissues are frozen in time. Oocytes, stem cells, germplasm, and sperm endure while the world keeps on changing. However, cryobanks are not simply stockpile facilities or archives. The (possibility of) storing organic materials creates potentialities and contingencies. Frozen cells become vital deposits, valuable backups, options to be considered.

Contrary to the prevalent idea of freezing as stabilizing, fixing, and containing bio-objects, this panel seeks to explore the generative dimensions of cryopreservation as a way of modifying relations and turning biological matter into things-to-become (Stephens et al. 2018). Putting organic materials ‘on ice’ shapes and redefines present socialities, politics, moral economies, and infrastructures. By the same token, it changes the ways in which futures are anticipated and enacted. Frozen matter alters existing and creates new temporalities.

We are looking for contributions that trace notions such as “anticipation”, “suspension”, “spaces of as-if”, “hope”, or “expectation” in the realm of cryopreservation. Participants are invited to ground these concepts in empirical insights into practices of cryo-banking and the materialities of frozen tissue.

More at https://cryosocieties.uni-frankfurt.de/work/cfp-easst/

Contact: braun@soz.uni-frankfurt.de

Keywords: cryopreservation, time, biobanks, future, biology

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

104. Making Home, With Care

Bernike Pasveer, Maastricht University; Ingunn Moser, Diakonhjemmet Oslo, Norway; Oddgeir Synnes, VID Specialized University Oslo, Norway

This panel focuses on analyzing and theorizing practices of making home understood as places/spaces/situations/processes that afford a sense of being cared for, protected, belonging. We wish to further new (and careful) conceptualizations of home as well as care, in a time where the availability of both is at once taken for granted and highly contested.

The context to the topic is twofold, and we would invite papers from both of these folds as well as on their intersections.

The first is the queste for ‘home’ and ‘homeliness’ in the organisation of care for later life: in the Global North, the elderly and the frail are encouraged and desire to be cared for at home or in situations as homely as possible. Where work has been done to theorize and unpack the notion of ‘care’ in this context, ‘home’ has largely remained a taken for granted concept, a blackbox, a given, and the ‘Northern-ness’ of the policies and desires to grow old ‘at home’ have hardly been situated and localized. We invite papers that unpack and situate home conceptually as well as empirically, technologically as well as materially: what does it take to make (and unmake) home in light of fragility? when is home? who cares?

The second ‘fold’ unpacks care more profoundly: it concerns the informal and often also invisible qualities of the work mobilized into making home with care, as well as the modes and politics of rendering informality and invisibility. We invite papers that look into the entangled calibrations of doing care (with home), and about articulating the many migrations undertaken to provide homely care or to seek a careful home.

Contact: b.pasveer@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: Home, Care, Doing, Materialities, (In)visibility, Entanglements

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

113. More-than-Human Ethnographies of Global Health

Luisa Reis Castro, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT); Jose A. Cañada, University of Helsinki

Global Health initiatives are a productive site to reflect on the role of non-humans as driving research and technology on health around the world. Non-human creatures are often framed as a (future) threat causing pandemics and pestilence. Movement of pathogens, insects, and pollutants that defy national borders are but some examples of non-humans that animate much of the Global Health research and policy today. STS scholars have examined the role of non-human entities in biomedicine as either functional assets (e.g. mice in labs), or outright detrimental to public health, a target to be controlled (as vectors of disease). Instead, this panel invites scholars to reflect on the role of non-human entities as analytically central to the ways in which Global Health collaborations are organized, where the non-human entities are at times symbiotic, at times commensal, and even parasitic.

In this panel, we invite papers to reflect on how universalist Global Health is problematized by non-humans in the particular policy and scientific spaces where global health programmes are implemented. This highlights the differentiated multi-species entanglements that make visible infrastructural divergences, unequal power dynamics, and different rationales of global health projects. How are non-humans considered to be limiting or enabling these kinds of projects? How are different ways to know and live with non-humans rearranged or erased in the implementation of these initiatives? The discussions will allow us to investigate: how might an analysis attentive and attuned to the more-than-human entanglements offer a new perspective on global health collaborations?

Contact: luisarc@mit.edu

Keywords: health; global STS; non-human; multispecies; postcolonial

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

115. Mutagenic Legacies and Future Living

Paul Wenzel Geissler, University of Oslo; Noemi Tousignant, University College London; Miriam Hanna Ancilla Waltz, Aarhus University

Modernist projects – e.g., ‘green revolutions’, disease eradication campaigns or power generation – have been rearranging molecular relations in the name of “better living,” as a chemical firm famously advertised. Lives improved by technology are and were imagined as a source of private comfort, security and profit. But abundant food, cheap energy, lucrative resources and controlled pathogens have also been hinged to societal ambitions for collective prosperity and protection.

Molecular rearrangements are mutagenic in a broad sense: vast volumes of substances have been synthesised or released by sociotechnical interventions, accumulating in bodies and environments, where they might alter genetic processes, foster cancerous cell proliferation or resistant microbes, and engender broader ecological reordering and novel interspecies relations. Yet past modernist projects can also be politically mutating and mutagenic. They exert durably transformative effects on and across changes in the values of life and the conditions of living, for variously positioned humans as well as nonhumans (defined as food, parasites, wildlife, etc.).     

This panel invites participants to examine modernist legacies through the lens of their biological and social mutagenicity. We welcome contributions that attend to past futures of better living, as imagined and embedded in modernist projects, and seek to discern their enduring presence, mutations and mutagenic effects in current possibilities for future living. We seek in particular to reflect on how mutagenic effects are exerted across changes in political regime and ideology (post-colonial, post-socialist, post-welfare, post-developmental) and the unequal relations of production and consumption they foster and seek to moderate.

Contact: miriamwaltz@cas.au.dk

Keywords: Modernity, Toxicity, Residuals, Environment

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

117. Negotiating knowledge of harm through affects, embodiment and trust

Anna Durnova, Institute of Sociological Studies/ Faculty of Social Sciences; Venla Oikkonen, Tampere University

The value of self-orientation – a central component of modern social orders especially in the global North – maintains that individuals may shape collective action through autonomy, plurality and protest. Yet, debates on health-related phenomena such as vaccine hesitancy or refusal of cancer screenings suggest that these widely accepted ideas are linked to institutionalized models of knowledge production. When individuals or communities question recommended medical procedures through other kinds of epistemic frameworks, such as embodied experiences or non-institutional knowledge production, the right to autonomy and protest is often questioned. The panel addresses health or technology-related debates in order to understand how ideas of harm, trust and legitimate knowledge are established and challenged. While, in general, patient participation in decisions on health measures is increasingly accepted, experiences and conceptualizations of harm impacting these decisions have not been given enough attention. Yet they open questions of what constitutes ‘knowledge’ and ‘trust’. We are interested in situated negotiations of knowledge, through which harm gets framed and possibly legitimized, and we pay special attention to affects, embodiment and trust. We welcome both theoretical papers contributing to STS conceptualizations of harm and empirical papers analyzing current negotiations of harm in health, technology or security. Possible questions include: How are knowledges of harm regulated, debated and contested in health, technology or security? What happens to knowledge, if we approach harm through affects and embodied experiences? In what ways is knowledge of harm a gendered and intersectional issue? How do STS scholars engage in these debates?

Contact: anna.durnova@univie.ac.at

Keywords: affect, body, harm, health, knowledge, trust

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Governance and Public Policy

120. New Technologies of Risk:  Bioeconomies of Prediction and Therapeutic Prevention

Emily Elizabeth Vasquez, Columbia University; Amaya Perez-Brumer, University of Toronto

Health is now elusive.  According to biomedical standards, we instead likely living at risk for disease.  Further, we may be diagnosed with a “pre-disease” or labeled among the “most at risk,” be it for HIV, diabetes, heart disease, or types of cancer. To avoid disease itself, we submit to medical interventions at the advice of not just doctors, but now also public health officials who sometimes not so jokingly joke about putting the first-line diabetes drug Metformin or statins to reduce cholesterol into our water supply.  People of diverse genders and sexualities, labeled “at high risk,” are prescribed HIV medicines to minimize their risk of contracting disease. Risk reducing mastectomies are recommended for carriers of the BRCA1/2 gene mutations. Indeed, new biomedical technologies, including screening algorithms and risk scores, genetic tests for predisposition, and an array of “drugs for life” are shifting understandings of population-level prevention and the right to health globally.  These technologies not only animate new subjectivities and inequalities among the “almost ill,” but also index growing economies centered on research, development, marketing, and intellectual property that increasingly extend to low- and middle-income country contexts.  This panel seeks to bring together papers that explore the political economy driving new technologies of risk and their implications for publics across contexts, for health governance, equity and activism, and for how we understand health and prevent disease.  To encourage comparative perspectives and an analysis of these technologies with global reach, contributions from non-Western countries and the Global South are particularly welcome.

Contact: eev2105@columbia.edu

Keywords: Bioeconomy; Risk; Biotechnology; Global Health; Inequality

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

122. Nocebos, Nocebo Studies, and STS: Meaning-Making and Recalcitrance

Ada Jaarsma, Mount Royal University; Suze Berkhout, University of Toronto; Khadija Coxon, McGill-Queen’s University Press

Nocebos, described by some as placebo’s evil twin, are unwelcome yet inextricable elements of medical treatment. In the mid-twentieth century, practices of informed consent were eliciting such pervasive adverse effects that researchers coined the term “Nocebo Effect” to render such impacts recognizable. Rather than anticipations of healing, the nocebo effect expresses expectations of harm—like side effects that emerge even when patients or trial participants receive placebos. While they are rarely familiar to the broader public, nocebo effects are intimately part of the array of interactions with which individuals relate to biomedicine. Nocebos point to the porous lines between bodies and epistemologies and between clinics and daily lives; as experiments in the burgeoning field of Nocebo Studies suggest, learning one’s genetic predispositions for disease or encountering media coverage of a generic drug’s ineffectiveness contribute to negative outcomes. Nocebos dramatize a liveliness that Isabelle Stengers and Vincianne Despret describe as “recalcitrance.” At odds with bifurcating logics that keep “matter” and “meaning” apart, nocebos animate a kind of meaning-making that is palpable, involuntary, and unwanted. This panel seeks to contribute to STS by exploring how nocebos and Nocebo Studies draw attention to the ontological choreography of biomedicine, such as the assemblages, practices or relations that constitute medical treatment and research. We welcome papers that examine the import of nocebos—broadly construed—for resistance to the norms and curative ambitions of medical treatment. And we invite presenters to make use of creative or new methodologies for identifying, interpreting and making sense of nocebo effects.

Contact: adajaarsma@gmail.com

Keywords: Placebos, nocebos, biomedicine, disability studies, materiality

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Science Communication/Public Engagement

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

129. Ordering knowledge in uncertain times: STS perspectives on the reinvention of the literature review

Bluemel Clemens, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Arno Simons, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies; Alexander Schniedermann, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies

In the age of post-truth and declining trust in scientific institutions, we witness novel ways of constructing, aggregating and presenting evidence in the sciences. New instruments for ordering and presenting knowledge, such as guidelines and novel databases are established aiming at substituting existing forms of knowledge – not always without friction.  The literature review appears to be one of the arenas where legitimate ways of knowing and presenting evidence are negotiated. Practices of reviewing the scientific literature are manifold; they vary historically and across disciplines.

Recent trends in some disciplines towards “systematic reviewing” (SR) and its positioning in discourses of “evidence-based practice”, “knowledge transfer” or “reproduction crisis”, have sparked a transforming debate about the epistemic role of the literature review. Systematic Reviews entered various scholarly realms and reordered promises and fears about what counts as a legitimate way of generating evidence.

What can STS contribute to current debates about the role of reviewing? The panel invites contributions that address questions, such as these:

What different forms of reviewing can be found, how have they changed, and how do they relate to each other? How do new forms reposition or replace established ones?

To which goals, values and problematizations are these forms linked? How do they relate to broader discourses?

How do they impact scientific practices and the relation of science to society? How does reviewing change the production of scientific knowledge and how does it relate to broader configurations of power-knowledge, such as the science-policy nexus?

Contact: bluemel@dzhw.eu

Keywords: reviewing practices, systematic review, evidence-based practice, knowledge-power relations

Categories: Knowledge, Theory and Method

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

134. Pharmaceutical and diagnostic futures: innovation, governance and practice

Paul Martin, Department of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield; Stuart Hogarth, University of Cambridge; Fred Steward, Policy Studies Institute

The development, marketing and use of new pharmaceutical and diagnostic products is playing an increasing role in shaping healthcare across the globe. Major changes are underway that may represent a fundamental transition in the sector, driven by the search for new sources of value, emerging technologies and systemic shifts in healthcare provision. Novel targeted and biological products are increasingly tied to new diagnostic tests facilitating the development of personalised medicine. A wave of ultra-expensive speciality and orphan medicines are posing major challenges for both access and existing regulatory frameworks and reconfiguring relations between patients and industry. The dynamics of pharmaceuticalisation and diagnostic innovation are extending the reach of Western medicine and international bioscience companies into new markets and the Global South, raising important social and ethical questions. This Open Panel invites papers related to pharmaceutical and diagnostic studies. We welcome papers on: the political economy of the global bio/pharma and diagnostics industry, new and alternative forms of knowledge production, the development of novel biological and speciality products, the changing role of patients in innovation and regulation, the challenge to existing forms of governance and Health Technology Assessment,  medicines for neglected and rare conditions, and situating pharmaceutical and diagnostic innovation within broader health system transitions. In particular, we are keen to encourage submissions from critical, feminist, post-colonial and Global South perspectives. The Panel aims to help build a global network of STS scholars working in this area and develop collaborative research on the major changes underway in this key sector.

Contact: paul.martin@sheffield.ac.uk

Keywords: Pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, political economy, knowledge production, governance

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

139. Public data repositories in the global health data economy

Ilpo Helén, University of Eastern Finland; Aaro Tupasela, University of Helsinki

During the past decade, digital health data has been highlighted as an asset with multiple values. This is due to many developments that have facilitated the emergence of global health data economy. Biomedical research has been impregnated by datafication; precision medicine has engendered great expectations and widespread activities; and corporations dominating the cyberspace like Google, Apple, Facebook and IBM have become increasingly interested in health-related digital data. At the same time, masses of health-related personal and population data exist and are continuously sourced in data reservoirs maintained by public authorities in different countries, especially in Europe. Now, national governments have shown an increased interest for wider and more intense utilization of health data reservoirs to facilitate biomedical research and personalized medicine, to improve clinical practices, and to boost innovative business in biomedicine and ICT. In addition, a number of projects to improve cross-border interoperability of these databases are under way in the EU and elsewhere, and transnational pharmaceutical and ICT corporations appear eager to engage in ‘collaboration’ for sourcing public health data. Discussion of this track will concentrate on the prospects, roles, purposes, and actual management of data sourcing by public authorities in the context of evolving global health data economy. We call for papers, first, about policy and technical rationales and practices that attempt to integrate collection, storage, circulation and uses public data with global health data economy, and, second, about problems and contestations related with such efforts of integration and collaboration.

Contact: ilpo.helen@uef.fi

Keywords: Health data sourcing, public databases, health data economy, data-driven health care

Categories: Big Data

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

144. Re-emerging Psychedelic Worlds: Altered States, Altered Subjects, Altered STS?

Claudia Schwarz-Plaschg, University of Vienna; Tehseen Noorani, The New School for Social Research

After decades of repression by governmental and intergovernmental bodies, psychedelic substances such as psilocybin, LSD and MDMA are being studied scientifically for their potential to tackle widespread mental health issues including depression and anxiety disorders. Psychedelic science, the mainstreaming of psychedelics (in Anglo-American contexts in particular), and the globalization of (indigenous) plant medicines – most notably with the Amazonian psychedelic plant brew ayahuasca – can all be seen as responses to a variety of crises, including the opiate crisis, mental health crisis, and environmental crisis. Simultaneously, the psychedelic movement is encountering its own crises, seeing its core values threatened by capitalist interests, the tension between science-led medicalization and grassroots-driven decriminalization, and identity politics forcing a confrontation with power inequalities within the movement itself.

STS analyses are essential in aiding and complicating the responsible (re)integration of psychedelics into society. This panel seeks to bring together STS psychedelic researchers in order to address the following:

• Which ways of being, seeing, and doing STS can contribute to psychedelic worlds that are emerging and continue to flourish in indigenous, scientific, underground and therapeutic contexts;
• How the cultural and socio-political dimensions of altered states of consciousness can be studied from STS and related perspectives;
• How non-ordinary states could inform STS sensibilities, alter researchers’ subjectivities and theories, and potentially re-shape the field of STS.

We particularly invite people, presentations and performances that reflexively attend to their form, style and content as necessarily entangled with, rather than apart from, questions of consciousness-changing practices and substances in society.

Contact: claudia.g.schwarz@univie.ac.at

Keywords: psychedelics, drugs, mental health, subjectivity, medicalization

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Knowledge, Theory and Method

145. Re-evaluating the high-tech and the low-tech: ideals and ideologies of the material

Hannah Cowan, King’s College London; Charlotte Kühlbrandt, King’s College London; Natassia Brenman, The University of Cambridge

This panel invites participants to question how values of high- and low-tech become attached to and emerge from particular kinds of materialities. There is growing concern in STS research around topics that get labelled ‘technoscience’, such as CRISPR genetically-engineered babies and cyborg-esque uses of artificial intelligence. But here we want to trouble scholarly focus on the materialities that get labelled high-tech, by thinking about the “lowness” of low-tech (such as water supply, housing infrastructures etc). We question taken-for-granted urgencies created by the politics and ethics of the high-tech and point to stagnated material relations that perpetuate economic inequality. Building on new materialism’s attention to the mundane as well as its often-neglected roots in historical materialism, this panel invites participants to think about how different kinds of materialities matter in particular spatiotemporal milieus. We encourage papers from different theoretical or ideological perspectives to ask: When and how should STS studies follow the biomedical endeavour to chase emerging worlds, and when should we pay more attention to the present, or even dare to imagine our own worlds? How should we as STS scholars collaborate or align ourselves with different kinds of materialities? And what are the effects of how medical practitioners, highly funded organisations, and STS scholars themselves, care for these different types of materialities?

Contact: Hannah.Cowan@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: New materialism, Historical materialism, high-tech, low-tech, inequality

Categories: Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Medicine and Healthcare

STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

150. Science and Technology Studies on Traditional, Complementary and Alternative Medicine (TCAM)

Jenny-Ann Brodin Danell, Umeå university, Department of Sociology; Pia Vuolanto, University of Tampere Research Centre for Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation Studies; Caragh Brosnan, University of Newcastle, Australia

Biomedicine has been very successful in lengthening lives, curing diseases and enhancing the quality of life in numerous ways in contemporary societies. Yet, countless people across the globe choose to complement biomedicine with different non-evidence-based therapies, healing practices and technologies. Some people even use these as alternatives to biomedicine to go “back to nature”, to resist medicalization and technologization by refusing vaccines and medications, or to simply express different lifestyles, worldviews and perceptions about good health. For STS scholars and sociologists of science, these practices and expressions do not only boil down to resistance or ignorance of medicine, but offer fruitful sites to analyse public understanding of science and biomedicine, to interpret relations between expert and  lay knowledge(s), and to understand hidden and suppressed knowledges of subordinate groups such as women, migrants, Asian, South American and African traditional healers and practitioners in the postcolonial sense. The integration of traditional and complementary medicine into biomedical spheres, as therapies and objects of scientific study, also increasingly blurs boundaries between these domains and has led to new concerns around knowledge colonisation.

This panel seeks contributions that explore traditional, complementary and alternative medicines (TCAM) and practices from STS perspectives. In particular we invite papers that target the role of STS theories and methods in studying TCAM. For example, how can we understand aspects of TCAM use, knowledge production, professionalization, standardization, ethics, globalization, and integration of TCAM – if focusing on material practices, hybridity, actor networks, or boundary work?

Contact: jenny-ann.danell@soc.umu.se

Keywords: complementary medicine; traditional knowledge; CAM; knowledge production; biomedicine

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Postcolonial/Decolonial STS

Knowledge, Theory and Method

156. Situating antimicrobial resistance (AMR): locations, spaces and borders

Catherine Marijke Will, University of Sussex; Alena Kamenshchikova, Maastricht University; Cristina Moreno Lozano, University of Edinburgh; Iona Walker, University of Edinburgh

‘Antimicrobial resistance’ (AMR) is increasingly figured as an international priority through activities by the World Health Organisation and European Union among others. A prominent slogan ‘bacteria do not respect borders’ also draws attention to the apparently global nature of the issue. In response, this panel calls for papers that situate the policies and practices of AMR – exploring how the issue and responses are framed in different institutions and locations; in different national contexts though stewardship or infection control policies and regulations; and in border regions and spaces like airports. Papers might address emerging practices for screening, surveillance, quarantine and antibiotic use in different contexts and cultures, or experiences of groups including ethnic minorities, immigrants and those with different infections.

In ethical terms it is suggested that AMR is often understood as a site of tension between the individual needing treatment in the short term and a collective interest in preserving antibiotic efficacy in the longer term, but this does not hold for all situations. In clinical medicine as in other social practices people do not have equal abilities to claim and receive treatment. Others become the focus of additional surveillance and control through the notion of potential risk. When and how are people’s vulnerabilities acknowledged or ignored in relation to antibiotic use or stewardships, and which groups are more affected by interventions? We invite scholars to discuss how AMR is shaping actions in specific locations, and how multiple framings co-exist or relate below the appeal to international standards or solutions.

Contact: cristina.moreno@ed.ac.uk

Keywords: Antimicrobial resistance, national policy, biomedical standards

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

162. Speculative Futures and the Biopolitics of Populations: Exploring Continuities and Discontinuities Across and Beyond Crisis Discourses

Mianna Meskus, Tampere University; Ayo Wahlberg, University of Copenhagen

Falling fertility rates, ageing populations, and the resulting strains on national economies and welfare systems engender headlines of national and international crises on a daily basis across the world. Simultaneously, the human population size has been problematized in terms of the ongoing climate crisis. Taking stock of these complex material legacies of modernity, this panel aims to bring together scholars whose work examines reproduction and/or ageing and how these broad yet intertwined phenomena figure as challenges for current governance in multiple ways. We are interested in how practices of science, technology and policy become enrolled in our demographically, economically and ecologically uncertain futures.

Imagining the future is increasingly speculative, meaning that there is an increase in the circulation of uncertainty-, risk-, and crisis-based models in attempts to make sense of where the world is heading. While visions of reproductive justice, successful ageing, care for the chronically and acutely ill, and ecological sustainability are in a state of flux, historical continuities are apparent as well. Biopolitical discussions revolve around questions such as, how should the vitality of populations be governed? Who should be allowed to reproduce? Is ageing an opportunity or a loss? What role does ‘nature’ play in furthering human wellbeing? We invite papers that examine how knowledge about demographic, ecological and economic futures are shaped by and/or escape notions of crisis. We especially welcome contributions from different parts of the world that examine concerns around falling fertility rates, ageing populations and the earth’s declining biocapacity.

Contact: mianna.meskus@tuni.fi

Keywords: reproduction, ageing, population, ecology, futures

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Governance and Public Policy

175. The (In)Visible Labour Of Translation: Creating Value In Translational Medicine

Rachel Faulkner-Gurstein, King’s College London; Clémence Pinel, University of Copenhagen; David Wyatt, King’s College London

Substantial public and private investments have been funnelled into building the infrastructure of translational medicine which, according to proponents, offers huge potential for advances in health and for economic growth. Such potential, however, is predicated on a variety of labour practices. It is performed by many different categories of worker, from research nurses to data scientists, in various settings and locations. This labour is highly uneven, and often unnoticed or unseen by policymakers and the public. In this panel, we focus attention on the labour that facilitates and underpins translational medicine as a key feature of life sciences research and the bioeconomy.

We are keen to explore the ways in which labour is understood, organised, and valued—including interrogating the hierarchical and gendered arrangements within which various stratified forms of labour take place. We want to question how such structures enable some practices to be rendered invisible and devalued, while some are highly privileged, prestigious, and valuable. We are equally interested in exploring if and how variously situated categories of workers contribute to the production of knowledge through their support, administrative, or care practices.

We invite papers from various disciplinary, empirical and theoretical perspectives to question what it takes to produce valuable knowledge in contemporary translational medicine. This panel contributes to the growing body of STS scholarship on the bioeconomy and translational medicine, as well as literature exploring the constitutive role of care in the production of knowledge and value.

Contact: david.wyatt@kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: labour, care, value, translational medicine, bioeconomy

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

180. The cyborg is getting older: exploring the body/machine fusion at the intersection of STS and Age Studies

Michela Cozza, Mälardalen University; Helen Manchester, University of Bristol; Alexander Peine, Utrecht University; Monika Urban, University of Bremen

In 1985, Haraway introduced the concept of ‘cyborg’ into social sciences to describe “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of a machine and organism” (p. 65). Thirty-five years later this figuration seems to have still something to offer to technoscience.

In this track, we revisit Joyce and Mamo’s (2006) suggestion to ‘gray the cyborg’ – that “technologies and science are central to definitions and lived experiences of aging and that aging is central to technologies and science (…) In many ways, aging people disproportionately rely on and negotiate technologies inside and outside of their bodies” (p. 100). However, it is noteworthy that heroic stories about the body/machine fusion prevail in cultural studies and medicine, and vulnerability of cyborgs is often overlooked in STS, which also show an almost exclusive interest in technologies external to bodies (Oudshoorn 2016).

This track brings together contributions at the intersection of STS, social gerontology and gerontechnology and invites prospective authors to ‘gray the cyborg’ by sharing theoretical and empirical insights about the entanglement of age, technology, and science.  Presentations are invited (but not limited) to:

• interrogate the applicability of cyborg figuration to the study of aging and technologies;
• tell stories other than the heroic ones, addressing the vulnerabilities related to the intertwinement of technologies and ageing bodies;
• explore new figurations that like the Haraway’s cyborg disrupt ‘boundaries’ and inhabit ‘margins’;
• revise the conceptualisation of an aging body when technologies of various kinds (implants, prostheses, etc) become part of the body itself or an extension of it.

Contact: michela.cozza@mdh.se

Keywords: Aging, Body, Cyborg, Technology, Vulnerability

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

181. The Era of Voice: STS and Emerging Healthcare Activism around Science, Politics and Markets

Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Théo Bourgeron, University College Dublin; Sonja Erikainen, University of Edinburgh

Fostered by social media and the development of transnational social movements, new forms of activism have emerged. People once silenced can now easily find others in similar conditions, build connections and speak up. These movements affect the fields of science, regulation and markets by catalyzing public attention and provoking increased political and commercial engagement.

In the medical domain, publics increasingly coalesce into activist groups and articulate their concerns and interests around all sorts of issues, including clinical practices, research priorities, pricing levels, pharmaceutical regulation, and policies around socio-environmental exposures.

We want to investigate how the healthcare landscape is reshaped by the unprecedented capacities of voice and activism in a reflexive way, by scrutinizing the engagements of STS in this process: we seek submissions that demonstrate the potential roles of STS in analyzing renewed healthcare activism, in engaging with activists, and possibly in doing activism.

We welcome papers from theoretical and empirical perspectives, critically engaging with these and related issues:

–              The transformative power of voice in medical practice, research, markets and policies

–              Voice in the medical domain from a historical and global perspective

–              Extended capacities of voice provided by social media: pros and cons

–              The voices that, for structural or contingent reasons, remain unheard

–              The range of medical issues that fail to catalyze activism

–              Neoliberalism and activism

–              STS in the era of voice and of healthcare activism: from roadmap to research activism

–              STS and activists: forms of reciprocal engagement

Contact: ilaria.galasso@ucd.ie

Keywords: voice, healthcare activism, research activism, healthcare markets, social media

Categories: STS and Social Justice/Social Movement

Medicine and Healthcare

Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

184. The Life of Numbers: Models, Projections, Targets and Other Enumerations

Tim Rhodes, Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW; Kari Lancaster, UNSW Sydney

Numbers are afforded life through their entanglements in situated practices. While numbers are often depicted as transcending contexts, this Panel appreciates numbers as relational beings. This orientates us towards exploring how and what numbers become, what they do, and the material effects they make through their implementations, appreciating enumerations as ‘evidence-making interventions’ (Rhodes & Lancaster, Social Science and Medicine, 2019). 

This Panel explores numbering practices as forms of anticipation and governance. Enumerations are afforded a power-of-acting through models, projections and targets which shape the present in relation to imagined futures. This is apparent in the field of global health, where mathematical models and numerical targets are shaping agendas, including as nations strive to achieve futures in which diseases might be eliminated. Enumerations are also key to the making of futures in relation to science, technology, environmental management, and climate. Reflecting on how numbers do their work in different policy, science and implementation sites, this Panel asks how the governing work of numbers – especially through models and modes of projection – is made-up in practices, with particular affects, inviting speculative thinking on the possibilities that enumerations can afford as well as on the futures they might close down.

We invite papers seeking to trace the life of enumerations, in action, in practices, as matters of method, affect and ethicopolitical concern, across different sites of policy, science and implementation. We are especially interested in health, including in relation to disease control, climate, and environment, but also economics, social policy, political science, and technology.

Contact: k.lancaster@unsw.edu.au

Keywords: Numbers, Governance, Futures, Implementation, Models.

Categories: Governance and Public Policy

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

190. The regimes of biomedical knowledge production: the changing face of clinical trials

Olga Zvonareva, Maastricht University, Netherlands; Anna Geltzer, University of Notre Dame

The randomized controlled trial (RCT) has long been considered the gold standard for clinical research; carried out to ascertain the safety and efficacy of health interventions. Recently, however, the authority of the RCT has become increasingly contested and is beginning to be substituted by alternative research designs. Concurrently, we can observe the emergence of new, apparently more flexible and pluralistic, standards and regulatory forms and an increasing fascination in biomedical research with the promises of personalized medicine and Big Data. This panel invites papers that explore how STS can interpret these developments and evaluate their implications. How is acceptance of different approaches to medical intervention testing as scientifically reliable and ethically sound enabled? What kinds of technological innovations facilitate new types of clinical trials and to what effect?

We are especially interested in comparative and historical perspectives on the rise and fate of RCTs. The panel speaks directly to the conference’s interest in the fate of “alternative” approaches and futures, and encourages submissions exploring how novel clinical research formats can offer insights on transformations in the culture and the politics of biomedicine.

Contact: o.zvonareva@maastrichtuniversity.nl

Keywords: clinical trials, biomedical knowledge production, evidence, medical research, regulation

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Big Data

191. The Sober Sciences of Intoxicated Subjects: Psychedelics and Their Societies

Nancy D. Campbell, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Erika Dyck, University of Saskatchewan

As the sober sciences of intoxication proliferate in the so-called psychedelic renaissance, psychedelics are in the process of surging across the policy-created border between medicine and not-medicine. As a boundary object, psychedelics are useful for interrogating the primacy of western-based, bio-medical sciences of intoxication. Papers in this panel will investigate such questions as, How has history of psychedelics affected our understanding of the culture of drug discovery and regulation? This open panel is particularly interested in the view that place and social location matter for what kind of science is done, who is credited in the process of discovery, and what subjects and objects of knowledge matter. This panel hopes for papers that explicitly engage with the political and epistemological aspects of pharmacology; with the social shaping of societies that engage with psychedelics; and with archivally grounded historical work. Historians have begun to track some of the major figures and events within the history of psychedelics, but the role of women and indigenous people, particularly as investigators and leaders in this science, has often been muted. The participation of these players challenged scientific methodology at the time, but much of the historiography has reinforced these actors as ‘others’, rendering certain figures hypervisible and others invisible in the process of reclaiming psychedelic science as a legitimate feature of psychopharmacological development in the mid-20thcentury.

Contact: campbell@rpi.edu

Keywords: Pharmaceutical drugs, science studies, psychedelic drugs, indigenous knowledges

Categories: Gender/Sexuality/Feminist STS

Medicine and Healthcare

Knowledge, Theory and Method

197. Towards a Critical Medical STS

Hined A Rafeh, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; Rebecca Monteleone, SFIS – Arizona State University; Yesmar Semaj Oyarzun, Rice University

In a world increasingly governed by technoscientific understandings of human bodyminds (Schalk 2018), what might a critical medical STS offer in theory and practice? Through this panel, we aim to contribute to a growing critical and intersectional medical STS research agenda, canon, and community, that centers on the contributions to STS understandings of science and biomedicine from critical race, critical disability, queer, and feminist perspectives. We seek submissions that engage critically with both their own subject matter and with current STS theory and practice to identify pressure points, generative alternatives, and productive coalitions in which to situate ourselves. Drawing on the work of scholars like Dorothy Roberts, Alondra Nelson, Aimi Hamraie, Kelly Fristch, and Emily Martin, we seek to explore what commitments, practices, and alignments STS scholars can and should make in the pursuit of scholarship and praxis regarding medicine, health, illness, and governance.

This panel invites work that aims to cultivate community, practice, and theory that is attentive to multiple matrices of institutional, personal, political and material oppressions in subjects relating to medicine, health, and illness. We welcome presentations that consider questions related to or offer provocations on topics including but not limited to:

– Epistemologies, practices, and perspectives that acknowledge the situated, embodied, or experiential expertise of pathologized bodyminds;

– Re-imaginings, redefinings, and rearticulations of bodyminds through relational practices;

– Interrogation and unsettling of medical authority, categorization, and its relationship to governance; and

– Processes of commercialization, professionalization, and design and deployment of biomedical technologies

Contact: yesmar@rice.edu

Keywords: health; illness; biomedicine; medicine; healthcare

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Genetics, Genomics, Biotechnology

Knowledge, Theory and Method

206. Value in Biomedicine

Katharina Kieslich, University of Vienna; Saheli Datta Burton, King’s College London; Katharina Theresa Paul, University of Vienna; Barbara Prainsack, University of Vienna; Gabby Samuel, King’s College London /Lancaster University

The frequency with which the concept of ‘value’ is used by policymakers, practitioners, insurers, researchers, managers, and patients to justify, question or promote new interventions underlines that its applications and definitions are a contemporary phenomenon, yet there is little understanding of what value is. We invite both empirical and conceptual papers that use biomedicine and health care as platforms through which to empirically address or reconceptualize understandings of value. The question of value, we expect, is particularly salien in areas such as genomics, health technology assessment (HTA), artificial intelligence (AI) and value-based pricing (VBP), but also public health. We ask: How are practices, ´things`, and processes made valuable in biomedicine and health care? What continuities and changes in understandings of value can be discerned? Who gets to define value in contemporary democracies, and how are these understandings of what (treatment, technology, data point etc) is valuable inscribed into sociotechnical infrastructures? What social practices and technologies are involved in these practices? What criteria and measurement tools are used in different contexts (organizational settings, policy contexts, etc)? How are ethical, moral, and economic norms involved and what role do appeals to ‘value’ have for the emergence of new solidarities? In this panel, we welcome both conceptual and empirical papers on the subject of value, and encourage speakers to reflect on the impact of their research on policy and practice.

Contact: katharina.t.paul@univie.ac.at

Keywords: value, biomedicine, data, health care, policy

Categories: Economics, Markets, Value/Valuation

Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy

207. Veterinary anthropology : the impact of animal studies on medical sciences

Ludek Broz, Institue of Ethnology of the Czech Academy of Sciences; Frédéric Keck, Laboratoire d’anthropologie socialem – CNRS

Over the last 5 years, the sub-discipline of veterinary anthropology has emerged in the wake of ethnographic and historical studies on zoonotic diseases, such as avian influenza, swine fever, rabies and the plague. Veterinary anthropology has been partly informed by Science and technology studies, and this panel aims to promote even closer synergy between these fields by engaging two pivotal questions: How is the body of veterinary knowledge generated? How does it travel from the centres of scientific knowledge production into bodies of normative practices nested in geographical, socio-cultural and political contexts?

These questions invite panellists to explore the relations between humans, animals and techniques in the different settings where humans care for animals and anticipate cross-species disease transmissions. Biosecurity interventions (culling, vaccinating or monitoring animals) requalify borders between territories and between species, building new collectives of humans and non-humans. We encourage investigation of different kinds of agency involved in these borderlands, be they those of pathogens or animals, of animal breeders or animal activists, and most importantly the agencies of vets as necessary and often invisible intermediaries in contemporary interactions between humans and animals.

Recognizing attention to zoonoses as a productive entry-point into veterinary anthropology we simultaneously invite panellists to engage what often stays in the shadow of “one health” concept including questions such as: Can animals be considered patients? Do they consent to their treatment? Do they evaluate the interactions that take place around their health? Who is authorized to distinguish a normal animal from a pathological one?

Contact: broz@eu.cas.cz

Keywords: veterinary anthropology, multispecies ethnography, zoonoses, biosecurity

Categories: Environmental/Multispecies Studies

Food and Agriculture

Medicine and Healthcare

213. Where is Care? (Un)Settling Place, Materialities and Imaginaries in the Making of Healthcare

Dara Ivanova, Erasmus School of Health Policy and Management; Iris Wallenburg, institute for Health Policy and Management; Roland Bal, Erasmus University Rotterdam; Andrea Ford, University of Chicago; Martyn Pickersgill, University of Edinburgh

Where care is provided has become a prominent policy concern in many nations, as healthcare systems attempt to solve a variety of issues through spatial reorganizations. Siting care within specific spaces, be they urban or rural areas, ‘healing’ gardens or high-tech hospitals promises to improve the efficiency and quality of healthcare provision. However, as geographers, STS scholars, and others have demonstrated, place is not ‘just’ a location on a map; places are imbued with affects such as feelings of (not) belonging and (un)safety, and shape and are shaped by multiple discourses of ‘good care’. It is these interrelations within care places that we wish to explore: we ask what and how materialities and imaginaries of care make and matter (for) the spaces of healthcare and what kinds of (care) places they engender

Building on STS work on place and the placing of care, this panel considers how healthcare spaces and places are (un) settled through preexisting and novel materialities and imaginaries. We seek empirical and theoretical contributions examining how the ‘where’ of care is (discursively, socially, materially) produced and productive of multiple ontologies of caring. We are particularly interested in the processes of place making for care, by which ‘countryside’, ‘city’, ‘region’ and ‘neighborhood’ co-constitute particular ways of doing, organizing and imagining care.

Contact: ivanova@eshpm.eur.nl

Keywords: care, health, place, imaginaries, materiality

Categories: Medicine and Healthcare

Governance and Public Policy