(2019) (with Katerina Vlantoni) “STS-informed approaches to biobanking, medical technologies and biotechnology: A workshop review” (original) (raw)
Related papers
Biology, Ethnography and STS. An interview with Christine Hine
2011
Christine Hine talks with Tecnoscienza about her academic trajectory and passions, from botany and biology to her entry into the STS field. In this interview she comments on her most famous book (Virtual Ethnography) and her latest work (Systematics as Cyberscience) which traces linkages between science practice and knowledge, ICTS and biology. Going back to her first academic background as a natural scientist, Christine Hine also recalls her experience as past president of EASST and asked about what young STS scholars would nowadays need, emphasizes the absolute centrality of networking and collaborations to foster the field with new yeast.
Towards an Anthropology of Bioplanning (Book Chapter) in-press
Super Nature Labs, 2023
Applied and Design anthropologists, equipped with their ethnographic immersive and experiential knowledge, are working hard to be at the forefront of the Bioplanning revolution. We are offering new ways to think about environment, conservation, and future regenerations—reframing debates and creating innovative solutions to the complex problems that confront us in the Anthropocene (Ruddock, 2015). We need to understand the “ways of seeing,” , “ways of knowing,” and “ways of being,” of others and be a part of the Indigenous Renaissance which sees us as a part of nature, and nature as a part of us—rather than human-centered ethnocentrism that has led to the destruction of living life everywhere (Birkes 2009).
Anthropology of Science and Technology
The anthropology of science, technology, and society (STS) has emerged alongside a number of closely neighboring fields of scholarship. Four features distinguish the anthropology of STS: (1) a detailed interest in the sciences and technologies themselves; (2) a global perspective, not just an account from Western Europe and North America; (3) multilocale or multisited ethnographic access to complex distributed processes such as the global chemical industry or global clinical trials; and (4) a concern with the powerful aesthetics of imaginaries. The task of translating legacy knowledges into public futures draws upon four kinds of genealogies: test drives and libidinal drives, protocols and networks, landscapes or ethical plateaus, and reknitting global moieties split by the cold war.
HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 2015
In this multi-authored essay, nine anthropologists working in different parts of the world take part in a conversation about the interfaces between anthropology and STS (science and technology studies). Through this conversation, multiple interfaces emerge that are heterogeneously composed according to the languages, places, and arguments from where they emerge. The authors explore these multiple interfaces as sites where encounters are also sites of difference-where complex groupings, practices, topics, and analytical grammars overlap, and also exceed each other, composing irregular links in a conversation that produces connections without producing closure.
Afterword: Data, Life, and Worlds in an Anthropology of Bioinformation
This essay is the afterword in the book, Bioinformation: Worlds and Futures, edited by Silvia Posocco and EJ Gonzalez-Polledo. This book sets out to define and consolidate the field of bioinformation studies in its transnational and global dimensions, drawing on debates in science and technology studies, anthropology and sociology. It provides situated analyses of bioinformation journeys across domains and spheres of interpretation. As unprecedented amounts of data relating to biological processes and lives are collected, aggregated, traded and exchanged, infrastructural systems and machine learners produce real consequences as they turn indeterminate data into actionable decisions for states, companies, scientific researchers and consumers. Bioinformation accrues multiple values as it transverses multiple registers and domains, and as it is transformed from bodies to becoming a subject of analysis tied to particular social relations, promises, desires and futures. The volume harnesses the anthropological sensibility for situated, fine-grained, ethnographically grounded analysis to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on the conceptual, political, social and ethical dimensions posed by bioinformation. EJ Gonzalez-Polledo teaches anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. They are the author of Transitioning: Matter, Gender, Thought, and are currently developing research on global open biology movements and global histories of bioinformation.
Call for Papers on “Ethnographic data generation in STS collaboration”
2019
STS scholars frequently engage in collaborative research, as groups of STS scholars as much as in collaborations with colleagues in other fields or non-academics. This SI explores how ethnographic data is generated and transformed for STS analysis in a range of such collaborative contexts. The special issues (SI) aims to lead beyond reflexivity accounts of positionality in STS ethnography and establish a benchmark for the STS ethnographic study of how ethnographic collaboration configures its data. This focus recognises that STS now build on and critically engage with a tradition of carefully scrutinising how scientists pursue their research-in the field, the laboratory, at desks and conferences. Recognising that textbooks' presentations of methods cannot be mirrored in their "applications" or "implementations", STS have questioned how to author STS accounts "after method"; and we may attend to "inventive methods" to pay attention to the various material and semiotic tools and devices (a) that configure research objects and (b) through which the researcher's data are achieved. Enacting our own STS ethnography's data involves a range of performances of "decisions", explicit and implicit assumptions and politico-normative inscriptions, contingent unfoldings and clashes with, potentially unruly, humans and non-humans; we have to "manage" our data as much as our relations within the research assemblages. Interestingly, however, STS have not yet developed a strong tradition for studying how our own collaborations are shaping the generation and transformation of our ethnographic data. The SI focuses on studying the relation between collaboration, ethnography and its data as it is configured in negotiations of different worlds, in collaborations across difference between researchers and other actants within their research assemblages. Who and what is accountable to what else and in what way in assembling researchers, our partners, subjects, objects, our devices and our data? How do these relations shape and effect not only data but also the objects we study? Ethnographically describing and analysing our method's data practices-this we call methodography. We deem developing and showcasing methodography a significant contribution to our field because this promises to equip STS not only with a resource that ethnograpically working STS scholars can well draw on to analyse their own method choices but also because this proposed SI performs exercising a genre, or a language, for presenting and telling such analyses.
Editors introduction: biobanks as sites of bio-objectification
Life sciences, society and policy, 2018
Biobanks and biorepositories have become increasingly important and prevalent since the 1990s as holders and distributors of biological material. They exhibit significant diversity in form and function, from the very small to the very large, from the very specialised to the much more generic, holding collections of diseased and healthy resources, from human, animal and plant, and span private, public and third sectors. They also operate as key mediators in relationships between patients, researchers, regulators and companies as they hold and distribute tissue, data and social credibility. Furthermore, they remain active sites in the mediation of controversy, sometimes causing controversy, sometimes closing controversy. In doing, they become important nodal points of regulatory practice (Douglas et al. 2012; Hansen and Metzler 2012). Their proliferation has resulted in new and dynamic ethical and policy issues in need of critical engagement, some of which are addressed in this thematic issue. A growing literature exists addressing these important issues and opening new ones for inspection. Here we present a set of papers that contribute to this work. The distinctiveness of this thematic issue is the application of a unified theoretical approach. The thematic issue takes biobanks and biorepositories as empirical and conceptual sites for articulating and applying the theoretical tool kit of Bio-objects, Bioobjectification and Bio-identification (cf. Tupasela and Stephens 2013). The thematic issue builds upon the work of the ISCH COST Action IS1001 "Bio-objects and their boundaries" to offer a set of interrelated papers that retain analytical continuity while exploring different empirical configurations of biobanking practice (cf. Vermeulen et al. 2012). The authors represented here understand the contents of biobanks as bio-objects: referring to "a socially potent biotechnological entity which generates controversy due to its potential challenging of established classifications" (Webster A: Bio-objectification: definitions and tools unpublished internal document. COST Bio-objects action, unpublished). They seek to analyse the role of biobanks in determining the boundaries of bioobjects, through the examination of the active process of 'bio-objectification' , meaning the process through which different types of bio-socio-technological categorizations contribute to the making of bio-objects. As a consequence of these novel relations, the boundaries between human and animal, organic and nonorganic, living and the suspension of living (and the meaning of death itself), are questioned and destabilized, as new relationships are formed (Tamminen and Vermeulen 2012). The analyst's task is to map how bio-objects are formed through bio-objectification processes, and to analyse the standardization, stabilization and labelling of a new entity.
Reconfiguring nature and culture: Intersections of medical anthropology and technoscience studies
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 1996
he collection of articles and commentaries that follows examines biomedical technologies that reconfigure "nature" and "culture" in distinctive ways. As T little as a decade ago topics such as neonatal intensive care, the classification systems used for Pap smears, organ procurement and transplantation, biomedical computing systems, heterodox approaches to cancer research, and genetic testing-the subjects of this theme issue-were not standard fare for anthropologists. Although ethnomedicine has been a common focus of research, anthropoiogical study of Westem biomedicine and technology was not undertaken in a systematic way until the early 1980s. Collectively, anthropologists were latecomers to the investigation of "biomedicine as ethnomedicine" (Gaines and Hahn 1982) for a variety of complicated historical reasons. Yet Western biomedicine and technologies are powerful focal points through which to examine key anthropological issues such as meanings, ideology, knowledge, power, and culture. As these articles signify, the time is ripe for anthropologists to (re)consider the role of technology in Western biomedicine. This is not to suggest that biomedical technologies have been ignored by anthropologists or by scholars using anthropological frameworks. Medical tech-Medical Anthropology Quarterly 10(4):52>536.