Lisa Lindén | University of Gothenburg (original) (raw)

Papers by Lisa Lindén

London Journal of Critical Thought, 2021

Sociology of Health & Illness, 2021

This article analyses patient advocacy for ovarian cancer patients' access to a group of new targ... more This article analyses patient advocacy for ovarian cancer patients' access to a group of new targeted cancer treatments, so-called poly (adenosine diphosphate ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors. Ovarian cancer is often detected in its advanced stages and has relatively poor survival rates. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Gynae Cancer Group, a Swedish patients' group, this article examines ovarian cancer patient advocates' engagement with biomedicine as a rarely considered topic in the social sciences. Adopting a modified version of the science and technology studies perspective on evidence-based activism, I analyse how ovarian cancer patient advocates engage in the ‘epistemic activities’ of framing, producing and mobilising ‘credentialed’ and ‘experiential’ knowledge. I show how patient advocates, alone and together with professionals and the media, engage in epistemic activities to ‘act upon’ ovarian cancer patients' anticipated limited time and poor prognosis: patient advocates mobilise around PARP inhibitors as offering hope, access to these drugs as an urgent matter and ovarian cancer care as unequal. The article contributes to the sociological literature on novel cancer treatments and patient advocacy through its ethnographic tracing of cancer advocacy tropes and knowledge practices, centred on the temporal figure of ‘the patient running out of time’.

Gendering Drugs, ed Johnson, E, 2017

In February 2014 Austria became the first European country to offer the human papillomavirus (HPV... more In February 2014 Austria became the first European country to offer the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to both girls and boys for free. This chapter discusses how this has involved a discursive shift from the individual girl “at risk” to the population of children as the vaccination recipient. With the help of Adele Clarke’s social worlds/arenas approach, we discuss the discursive positions taken by a range of different governmental and non-governmental actors concerning the HPV vaccine. Combining an analysis of public information material with an analysis of interviews with administration and health-care staff, the chapter highlights how gender, sexual disease transmission and immunization are articulated and discussed in the chosen social worlds of the Austrian HPV vaccination arena. In relation to that, we stress how a changed management of HPV vaccine evidence has crucial consequences for how the vaccination recipient and, in a broader sense, the Austrian population are constructed. We argue that the current discourse in Austria differs fundamentally from how the HPV vaccine often is framed as an individual, yet gendered, risk responsibility. In the current dominant Austrian discourse, herd immunity is anticipated through transformed relations between the individual and the population.

Gendering Drugs, ed. Johnson, E, 2017

This chapter explores how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in Sweden for the human papillomav... more This chapter explores how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in Sweden for the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil (advertised as a vaccine for young girls for the prevention of cervical cancer) addresses parents and articulates gendered parental care relationships. Vaccination practice invokes a tension between the collective good and individual choice, and encourages parents to exercise good consumer choices for their children (Rose and Blume 2003; Fairhead and Leach 2007). The trope of parents-as-consumers can present the management of health risks as an individual responsibility rather than a matter of population health (Reich 2014). Vaccination practices can be read as an example of a pharmaceuticalization of life, which transforms the relations between, in this case, parents, daughters, health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, and creates new relations of caring which require the involvement of pharmaceuticals as essential participants (even when actively resisted by potential recipients) in the relationship (cf. Williams et al. 2009, 2011).

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2021

Research in science and technology studies has analyzed how patients' groups engage in practices ... more Research in science and technology studies has analyzed how patients' groups engage in practices that connect biomedicine and patient experience in order to become involved in the shaping of biomedical research. However, there has been limited attention to the affective dimensions of such practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a gynecological cancer patients' group in Sweden, this article focuses on practices that aim to influence researchers and research institutions to prioritize biomedical gynecological cancer research. It analyzes how "affects" are woven through these practices and pays attention to the entanglements of affects, biomedical research, and lay experience they involve. The article explores the relation between the gynecological cancer patients' group and biomedical research as a set of material-semiotic practices of "moving evidence." These practices of moving evidence (1) enact gynecological cancer as underresearched; (2) collect and produce new "evidence"; (3) "mobilize" the evidence at public events, in interactions with biomedical researchers, and in different online settings; and (4) entangle affects with biomedical and

Qualitative Research, 2021

This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It di... more This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It discusses how our practices of 'describing collaboratively' shifted what we attended to in observations of participants in a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organisation. We show how the care the organisation aims to promote is troubled and seemingly undermined by attending to palliative care. Our aim is to explore the ethico-political potential of describing things that 'unsettle' care practices. Building on Feminist Technoscience Studies, arguing that researchers should attend to 'neglected things' in order to care for them, we focus on affects, atmospheres and fleeting moments that are overlooked, or threaten to undermine, participants' practices of care. We show how our descriptions that zoom in on things at the periphery and attend to the elusive, restage what gets to count as care and could support care practices that are more liveable for those concerned.

Nordic Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2021

Women, Gender & Research, 2018

Recent decades have seen the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and m... more Recent decades have seen the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and methods of prenatal diagnosis. As a result, there are now several ways to predict the genetic sex of embryos as well as visualizing the sex of fetuses. However, how, when and where these technologies may be used have become politicized questions, both internationally and in Sweden. By providing a close reading of the Swedish political debate about technologies for the determination of the sex of fetuses and embryos from the end of the 1980s onwards, this article shows how technologies of prenatal diagnosis are articulated as problematic in the context of sex-determination. By "staying with the trouble" of sex in the political debate about sex-determination, we discuss how the ability to identify fetal or chromosomic sex through prenatal diagnosis is articulated as an unwanted trouble warranting political and ethical concern. The article also highlights the "ethico-political" restrictions imposed on information about the unborn's sex. It shows that, rather than prenatal diagnosis enabling promissory or hopeful visions of the future, the political debate is preoccupied with feelings of concern about the potential misuses of these technologies.

Science & Technology Studies, 2020

Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena fo... more Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement. Against this backdrop, this article attends to how citizens confirm, debate and resist governmental framings of health information online. By drawing upon STS and affect theory, it centers on the digital mediation of feelings on a Facebook engagement site for HPV vaccination. While the public authorities framed HPV vaccination as a matter of love and fear, a wide register of positive and negative feelings were mediated on the site. The article proposes the notion of 'digitalised literary devices' to analyse how mundane literary habits, such as the use of punctuation, online have been transformed to digital devices that, for instance, mediate public feelings. By conceptualizing public engagement as 'civic intensities' , it shows how digital devices, such as digitalised literary devices, mediate and intensify public feelings of engagement.

This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying tre... more This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying trends in the design of biomedical experiments. The basic premise of the study is that the very act of establishing a research design entails a process involving a series of valuations where different values are evoked, ordered, and displaced. In focus is the articulation and ordering of what counts as central values in research design for two kinds of biomedical treatment trials, namely the traditional randomised controlled trial (RCT) and the emerging new form of biomarker trials used to assess biomarker/treatment combinations (BTTs). The empirical material consists of textbooks (RCTs) and journal articles (BTTs). We ask how these materials articulate the various scientific, medical, and economic values at play. Among the differences uncovered are a difference in relation to what counts as ethical in relation to prior knowledge, differences in the flexibility in design as well as the valuation of the risk for false positives and false negatives. More broadly, the study shows how textual accounts of different ways of producing knowledge are linked to partly different valuations of ethics, flexibility, and risk as part of establishing the research design of biomedical experiments.

Valuation Studies, 2013

This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Base... more This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Based on impressions from the Valuation as Practice workshop at The University of Edinburgh in early 2014 we were inspired by the example of to debate how we see, understand, and are inspired by the field of valuation studies. It is the hope of the editors that sharing the concerns of early-stage researchers starting out in a field in flux, may be of use to, and perhaps spur, senior contributors to further develop this emerging research landscape. Using the workshop experience as a springboard, we argue that the domain of valuation studies still relies heavily on influences from the study of economics, with a strong emphasis on processes of quantification and calculation. With apparent pragmatism within the field, concern as to what might be lost by this narrower perspective is raised. Additionally, we call for the exploration of the possibility of a common language of valuation, to better define shared features, and identify as well as manage conflicts within the field. !

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Sep 2015

This review synthesizes S. Lochlann Jain's monograph Malignant (2013) and Jackie Stacey's monogra... more This review synthesizes S. Lochlann Jain's monograph Malignant (2013) and Jackie Stacey's monograph Teratologies (1997).

Valuation Studies, 2013

This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Base... more This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Based on impressions from the Valuation as Practice workshop at The University of Edinburgh in early 2014 we were inspired by the example of to debate how we see, understand, and are inspired by the field of valuation studies. It is the hope of the editors that sharing the concerns of early-stage researchers starting out in a field in flux, may be of use to, and perhaps spur, senior contributors to further develop this emerging research landscape. Using the workshop experience as a springboard, we argue that the domain of valuation studies still relies heavily on influences from the study of economics, with a strong emphasis on processes of quantification and calculation. With apparent pragmatism within the field, concern as to what might be lost by this narrower perspective is raised. Additionally, we call for the exploration of the possibility of a common language of valuation, to better define shared features, and identify as well as manage conflicts within the field. !

Girlhood Studies, 2013

This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine,... more This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, as a contemporary gendered technology of the adolescent girl body. It explores how, by constructing girls as ideal users of the vaccine, advertising campaigns encourage adolescent girls to vaccinate themselves. Using a feminist visual discourse analysis, the article examines how different girl subjectivities are constructed through advertising, and presented as fit for Gardasil use and consumption. It highlights how, along with their parents, adolescent girls in Sweden are encouraged to assume responsibility for managing the risks of cervical cancer in order to help secure their future health, sexuality and normality. It argues that the Gardasil campaign, in being addressed to individual members of the population, serves to articulate global and national discourses of girlhood, sexuality, (sexual) health responsibility, risk management and consumption.

Books by Lisa Lindén

This dissertation examines three state-funded human papillomavirus (HPV) campaigns in Sweden. The... more This dissertation examines three state-funded human papillomavirus (HPV) campaigns in Sweden. The author shows that they include and articulate a range of different forms of care that are not limited to just asking people to “take care of themselves” or “care for others”. Care is instead approached as a multilayered, contextual and contingent phenomenon, and as made by a heterogeneity of human and nonhuman components. The study shows how care is articulated by human actors such as county council professionals who try to communicate care to girls and their relatives, and by material devices like an “HPV app”, a Facebook campaign site and a vaccination trailer which enable, distribute and trouble different forms of care.

Campaign devices and campaign media, interviews, and textual cancer narratives are analyzed using a feminist science and technology studies (STS) approach. The study is situated within feminist STS discussions on the politics of care in technoscience, and contributes to discussions on temporal dimensions of care. In the campaign material the study examines, there is a dominant focus on care as something that needs to be done now to enable a healthy and happy future. By working with an ethico-political and analytical standpoint that is focused on making present neglected, marginal, absent and alternative matters of care, the author disrupts and troubles such future-oriented visions of care as an “anticipatory immediacy” through a focus on other temporalities of care. These include slower, messier and folded temporalities which open up for uncertainties, hesitations, indeterminacies, a range of feelings, and for more caring articulations of what care is.

Keywords: HPV vaccination, health campaigns, public health, care, temporality, feelings, gender, sexuality, science and technology studies, feminist theory

London Journal of Critical Thought, 2021

Sociology of Health & Illness, 2021

This article analyses patient advocacy for ovarian cancer patients' access to a group of new targ... more This article analyses patient advocacy for ovarian cancer patients' access to a group of new targeted cancer treatments, so-called poly (adenosine diphosphate ribose) polymerase (PARP) inhibitors. Ovarian cancer is often detected in its advanced stages and has relatively poor survival rates. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with the Gynae Cancer Group, a Swedish patients' group, this article examines ovarian cancer patient advocates' engagement with biomedicine as a rarely considered topic in the social sciences. Adopting a modified version of the science and technology studies perspective on evidence-based activism, I analyse how ovarian cancer patient advocates engage in the ‘epistemic activities’ of framing, producing and mobilising ‘credentialed’ and ‘experiential’ knowledge. I show how patient advocates, alone and together with professionals and the media, engage in epistemic activities to ‘act upon’ ovarian cancer patients' anticipated limited time and poor prognosis: patient advocates mobilise around PARP inhibitors as offering hope, access to these drugs as an urgent matter and ovarian cancer care as unequal. The article contributes to the sociological literature on novel cancer treatments and patient advocacy through its ethnographic tracing of cancer advocacy tropes and knowledge practices, centred on the temporal figure of ‘the patient running out of time’.

Gendering Drugs, ed Johnson, E, 2017

In February 2014 Austria became the first European country to offer the human papillomavirus (HPV... more In February 2014 Austria became the first European country to offer the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine to both girls and boys for free. This chapter discusses how this has involved a discursive shift from the individual girl “at risk” to the population of children as the vaccination recipient. With the help of Adele Clarke’s social worlds/arenas approach, we discuss the discursive positions taken by a range of different governmental and non-governmental actors concerning the HPV vaccine. Combining an analysis of public information material with an analysis of interviews with administration and health-care staff, the chapter highlights how gender, sexual disease transmission and immunization are articulated and discussed in the chosen social worlds of the Austrian HPV vaccination arena. In relation to that, we stress how a changed management of HPV vaccine evidence has crucial consequences for how the vaccination recipient and, in a broader sense, the Austrian population are constructed. We argue that the current discourse in Austria differs fundamentally from how the HPV vaccine often is framed as an individual, yet gendered, risk responsibility. In the current dominant Austrian discourse, herd immunity is anticipated through transformed relations between the individual and the population.

Gendering Drugs, ed. Johnson, E, 2017

This chapter explores how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in Sweden for the human papillomav... more This chapter explores how direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising in Sweden for the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine Gardasil (advertised as a vaccine for young girls for the prevention of cervical cancer) addresses parents and articulates gendered parental care relationships. Vaccination practice invokes a tension between the collective good and individual choice, and encourages parents to exercise good consumer choices for their children (Rose and Blume 2003; Fairhead and Leach 2007). The trope of parents-as-consumers can present the management of health risks as an individual responsibility rather than a matter of population health (Reich 2014). Vaccination practices can be read as an example of a pharmaceuticalization of life, which transforms the relations between, in this case, parents, daughters, health professionals and pharmaceutical companies, and creates new relations of caring which require the involvement of pharmaceuticals as essential participants (even when actively resisted by potential recipients) in the relationship (cf. Williams et al. 2009, 2011).

Science, Technology, & Human Values, 2021

Research in science and technology studies has analyzed how patients' groups engage in practices ... more Research in science and technology studies has analyzed how patients' groups engage in practices that connect biomedicine and patient experience in order to become involved in the shaping of biomedical research. However, there has been limited attention to the affective dimensions of such practices. Based on ethnographic fieldwork with a gynecological cancer patients' group in Sweden, this article focuses on practices that aim to influence researchers and research institutions to prioritize biomedical gynecological cancer research. It analyzes how "affects" are woven through these practices and pays attention to the entanglements of affects, biomedical research, and lay experience they involve. The article explores the relation between the gynecological cancer patients' group and biomedical research as a set of material-semiotic practices of "moving evidence." These practices of moving evidence (1) enact gynecological cancer as underresearched; (2) collect and produce new "evidence"; (3) "mobilize" the evidence at public events, in interactions with biomedical researchers, and in different online settings; and (4) entangle affects with biomedical and

Qualitative Research, 2021

This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It di... more This article explores the potential of describing things at the periphery of our attention. It discusses how our practices of 'describing collaboratively' shifted what we attended to in observations of participants in a Swedish gynaecological cancer patient organisation. We show how the care the organisation aims to promote is troubled and seemingly undermined by attending to palliative care. Our aim is to explore the ethico-political potential of describing things that 'unsettle' care practices. Building on Feminist Technoscience Studies, arguing that researchers should attend to 'neglected things' in order to care for them, we focus on affects, atmospheres and fleeting moments that are overlooked, or threaten to undermine, participants' practices of care. We show how our descriptions that zoom in on things at the periphery and attend to the elusive, restage what gets to count as care and could support care practices that are more liveable for those concerned.

Nordic Journal of Science & Technology Studies, 2021

Women, Gender & Research, 2018

Recent decades have seen the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and m... more Recent decades have seen the rapid development of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) and methods of prenatal diagnosis. As a result, there are now several ways to predict the genetic sex of embryos as well as visualizing the sex of fetuses. However, how, when and where these technologies may be used have become politicized questions, both internationally and in Sweden. By providing a close reading of the Swedish political debate about technologies for the determination of the sex of fetuses and embryos from the end of the 1980s onwards, this article shows how technologies of prenatal diagnosis are articulated as problematic in the context of sex-determination. By "staying with the trouble" of sex in the political debate about sex-determination, we discuss how the ability to identify fetal or chromosomic sex through prenatal diagnosis is articulated as an unwanted trouble warranting political and ethical concern. The article also highlights the "ethico-political" restrictions imposed on information about the unborn's sex. It shows that, rather than prenatal diagnosis enabling promissory or hopeful visions of the future, the political debate is preoccupied with feelings of concern about the potential misuses of these technologies.

Science & Technology Studies, 2020

Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena fo... more Social media are increasingly envisioned by public health authorities as a new promising arena for public engagement. Against this backdrop, this article attends to how citizens confirm, debate and resist governmental framings of health information online. By drawing upon STS and affect theory, it centers on the digital mediation of feelings on a Facebook engagement site for HPV vaccination. While the public authorities framed HPV vaccination as a matter of love and fear, a wide register of positive and negative feelings were mediated on the site. The article proposes the notion of 'digitalised literary devices' to analyse how mundane literary habits, such as the use of punctuation, online have been transformed to digital devices that, for instance, mediate public feelings. By conceptualizing public engagement as 'civic intensities' , it shows how digital devices, such as digitalised literary devices, mediate and intensify public feelings of engagement.

This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying tre... more This article examines the shifting conditions for biomedical knowledge production by studying trends in the design of biomedical experiments. The basic premise of the study is that the very act of establishing a research design entails a process involving a series of valuations where different values are evoked, ordered, and displaced. In focus is the articulation and ordering of what counts as central values in research design for two kinds of biomedical treatment trials, namely the traditional randomised controlled trial (RCT) and the emerging new form of biomarker trials used to assess biomarker/treatment combinations (BTTs). The empirical material consists of textbooks (RCTs) and journal articles (BTTs). We ask how these materials articulate the various scientific, medical, and economic values at play. Among the differences uncovered are a difference in relation to what counts as ethical in relation to prior knowledge, differences in the flexibility in design as well as the valuation of the risk for false positives and false negatives. More broadly, the study shows how textual accounts of different ways of producing knowledge are linked to partly different valuations of ethics, flexibility, and risk as part of establishing the research design of biomedical experiments.

Valuation Studies, 2013

This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Base... more This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Based on impressions from the Valuation as Practice workshop at The University of Edinburgh in early 2014 we were inspired by the example of to debate how we see, understand, and are inspired by the field of valuation studies. It is the hope of the editors that sharing the concerns of early-stage researchers starting out in a field in flux, may be of use to, and perhaps spur, senior contributors to further develop this emerging research landscape. Using the workshop experience as a springboard, we argue that the domain of valuation studies still relies heavily on influences from the study of economics, with a strong emphasis on processes of quantification and calculation. With apparent pragmatism within the field, concern as to what might be lost by this narrower perspective is raised. Additionally, we call for the exploration of the possibility of a common language of valuation, to better define shared features, and identify as well as manage conflicts within the field. !

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, Sep 2015

This review synthesizes S. Lochlann Jain's monograph Malignant (2013) and Jackie Stacey's monogra... more This review synthesizes S. Lochlann Jain's monograph Malignant (2013) and Jackie Stacey's monograph Teratologies (1997).

Valuation Studies, 2013

This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Base... more This discussion note provides a perspective on valuation studies by a group of PhD students. Based on impressions from the Valuation as Practice workshop at The University of Edinburgh in early 2014 we were inspired by the example of to debate how we see, understand, and are inspired by the field of valuation studies. It is the hope of the editors that sharing the concerns of early-stage researchers starting out in a field in flux, may be of use to, and perhaps spur, senior contributors to further develop this emerging research landscape. Using the workshop experience as a springboard, we argue that the domain of valuation studies still relies heavily on influences from the study of economics, with a strong emphasis on processes of quantification and calculation. With apparent pragmatism within the field, concern as to what might be lost by this narrower perspective is raised. Additionally, we call for the exploration of the possibility of a common language of valuation, to better define shared features, and identify as well as manage conflicts within the field. !

Girlhood Studies, 2013

This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine,... more This article investigates direct-to-consumer advertising in Sweden for Gardasil, the HPV vaccine, as a contemporary gendered technology of the adolescent girl body. It explores how, by constructing girls as ideal users of the vaccine, advertising campaigns encourage adolescent girls to vaccinate themselves. Using a feminist visual discourse analysis, the article examines how different girl subjectivities are constructed through advertising, and presented as fit for Gardasil use and consumption. It highlights how, along with their parents, adolescent girls in Sweden are encouraged to assume responsibility for managing the risks of cervical cancer in order to help secure their future health, sexuality and normality. It argues that the Gardasil campaign, in being addressed to individual members of the population, serves to articulate global and national discourses of girlhood, sexuality, (sexual) health responsibility, risk management and consumption.

This dissertation examines three state-funded human papillomavirus (HPV) campaigns in Sweden. The... more This dissertation examines three state-funded human papillomavirus (HPV) campaigns in Sweden. The author shows that they include and articulate a range of different forms of care that are not limited to just asking people to “take care of themselves” or “care for others”. Care is instead approached as a multilayered, contextual and contingent phenomenon, and as made by a heterogeneity of human and nonhuman components. The study shows how care is articulated by human actors such as county council professionals who try to communicate care to girls and their relatives, and by material devices like an “HPV app”, a Facebook campaign site and a vaccination trailer which enable, distribute and trouble different forms of care.

Campaign devices and campaign media, interviews, and textual cancer narratives are analyzed using a feminist science and technology studies (STS) approach. The study is situated within feminist STS discussions on the politics of care in technoscience, and contributes to discussions on temporal dimensions of care. In the campaign material the study examines, there is a dominant focus on care as something that needs to be done now to enable a healthy and happy future. By working with an ethico-political and analytical standpoint that is focused on making present neglected, marginal, absent and alternative matters of care, the author disrupts and troubles such future-oriented visions of care as an “anticipatory immediacy” through a focus on other temporalities of care. These include slower, messier and folded temporalities which open up for uncertainties, hesitations, indeterminacies, a range of feelings, and for more caring articulations of what care is.

Keywords: HPV vaccination, health campaigns, public health, care, temporality, feelings, gender, sexuality, science and technology studies, feminist theory