Biosocieties最新文献

As digital health technologies (DHT) have been embraced as a 'panacea' for health care systems, they have evolved from a buzzword into a high priority objective for health policy across the globe. In the realm of quality and safety standards for medical devices, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has been a frontrunner in adapting its regulatory framework to DHT. However, despite the utmost relevance of quality and safety standards and their role for sustaining the innovation pathway of DHT, their actual making has not yet been subjected to in-depth social-science scrutiny. Drawing on the conceptual repertoires of Science and Technology Studies (STS), this article investigates how digital health evolved from a buzzword into an 'object of government', or gained material meaning and transformed into a regulatable object, by charting the standard-making process of FDA's medical digital health policy between 2008 and 2018. From this, we reflect on the mutually sustaining dynamics between technological and organizational innovation, as the FDA's attempts to standardize medical DHT not only shaped the lifestyle/medical boundary for DHT. It also led to significant reconfigurations within the FDA itself, while fostering a broader shift toward the uptake of alternative forms of evidence in regulatory science.

This article traces the history of India's first tertiary cancer hospital, Tata Memorial Hospital (TMH). TMH was originally conceived in 1932 as a philanthropic project by the Tatas, an elite Parsi business family in Bombay. The founding of TMH represented a form of philanthro-capitalism which both enabled the Tatas to foster a communal acceptance for big businesses in Bombay and provide the Tatas with the opportunity to place stakes in the emerging nuclear research economy seen as essential to the scientific nationalist sentiment of the post-colonial state. In doing this, the everyday activities of TMH placed a heavy emphasis on nuclear research. In a time when radium for the treatment of cancer was still seen as 'quackery' in much of the world, the philanthro-capitalist investment and the interest in nuclear research by the post-colonial state provided an environment where radium medicine was able to be validated. The validation of radiotherapy at TMH influenced how other cancer hospitals in India developed and also provided significant resources for cancer research in early-mid twentieth century India. Ultimately, this article identifies ways in which cancer comes to be seen as relevant in the global south and raises questions on the relationship between local and global actors in setting health priorities.

There is little research on how nationalism is adopted and deployed to foster but also to challenge sex-, gender- and HIV-related stigma in Thailand and other nation states across Southeast Asia. The available literature highlights how self-help groups for Thai people with HIV function as communities of practice, as sites of learning, and for gaining and preserving knowledge (Tanabe 2008, Liamputtong 2009, 2014). This article contributes to the literature by demonstrating how collectives of same-sex-attracted men and male-to-female transgender people living with HIV (PLHIV) in Thailand learn and teach each other how to alleviate social and personal barriers that impede access to health care. The study adopted qualitative research methods and interviewed 22 participants in five cities in Thailand. This article highlights how collective action, which adopts and reinterprets the symbols and metaphors of Thai nationalism, acts as a 'deviance disavowal' strategy (Davis 1961). By deploying Thai nationalism, same-sex attracted men and transgender PLHIV reposition 'spoiled identities' and break through the stigma they report after HIV diagnosis. Describing mechanisms of 'deviance disavowal' in Thailand may provide an opportunity to deploy strategies to manage stigma that interferes with access to health care in Thailand, and in other nation states, and may be applicable to other stigmatised groups and illnesses.

The ever-expanding availability of reproductive technologies, the continued roll-out of 'family planning' and maternity services across low- and middle-income settings and the rapid development of the fertility industry mean that it is more likely than ever that individuals, especially women and gender non-conforming people, will engage with more than one RT at some point in their life. These multiple engagements with RTs will affect users' expectations and uptake, as well as the technologies' availability, commercial success, ethical status and social meanings. We argue that an integrated approach to the study of RTs and their users not only makes for better research, but also more politically conscious research, which questions some of the ideological precepts that have led to reproduction being parcelled out into biomedical specialisations and a disproportionate focus on particular forms of reproduction in particular disciplines within public health and social science research. We offer this article as part of a wider movement in the study of reproduction and reproductive technologies, which takes inspiration from the reproductive justice framework to address forms of exclusion, discrimination and stratification that are perpetuated in the development and application of reproductive technologies and the ways in which they are studied and theorised.

This article critically examines UK biometric policymaking by charting the bodies identified by the 2018 Home Office Biometric Strategy as playing key roles in the oversight of biometric data used in law enforcement and other related functions. The article argues that oversight actors are embedded in biometric imaginaries promoted by the UK Home Office and the devolved Scottish administration. By mapping oversight of UK biometrics policy together with developments in Scotland, the article challenges sociotechnical imaginaries studies which assume the power of national governments to project dominant, cohesive and instrumental visions. The article peels away that image to reveal UK biometric policy as located within a patchwork in which embedded commissioners, regulators and advisors challenge biometric imaginaries through interpretive flexibility and standpoint. By identifying technical, operational, legislative and ethical issues, these actors challenge the UK government imaginary and act as channels of critique between it and wider stakeholder communities. The article further challenges assumptions concerning the cohesion of national imaginaries by highlighting a diverging approach to biometric governance in Scotland. The article uses these observations to sketch a means to further characterise the notion of the biometric imaginary and to address biometric policymaking more widely.

Monoclonal antibodies are revolutionizing cancer treatments, but come at an increasingly problematic price for health services worldwide. This leads to pressing demands for access, as in the case of Kadcyla. In 2015, patients in the United Kingdom invoked the sovereign rights of the Crown in order to demand access to this expensive yet potentially life-saving medicine that had prior been de-listed due to price. This article interprets this campaign as an act of sovereign reassertion against a fundamental exclusion, which, however, ultimately fails to challenge the concrete mechanism enabling this exclusion-intellectual property (IP). By connecting this example to other declarations of molecular sovereignty, the article argues that the use of sovereignty can perpetuate further exclusion. Drawing on the notion of biocoloniality (Schwartz-Marín and Restrepo 2013) it points out that the intellectual property regime contains a deeply embedded fiction of the world as terra nullius, a blank uninhabited canvas ripe for discovery and appropriation. This decontextualised vision of life as property works to exclude populations and patients from playing a significant role in determining the use of technologies and treatments. Instead of countering this fundamental exclusion, the concept of sovereignty further entrenches this assumption and merely contests the assignation of this property.