Repeatedly, when medical scientists propose the authorization of new biotechnologies, fears and hopes emerge alongside new impasses, legal frictions, and uncertainties. This applies, for example, to cutting-edge therapies potentially capable of treating chronic diseases and, hence, of substituting pharmaceuticals that are currently in use (sometimes paradigmatically). While navigating between this skepticism towards regulatory authorities and reassurances of faith in science, which biopolitical agendas are enacted and disseminated by the proposed biotechnologies in contemporary health innovation arenas?
This panel aims to explore the impacts of new health technologies on different societies and how, in turn, multiple actors affect new biotechnologies, including their evaluation processes, design and related health policies. The panel invites contributions that address aspects of the development, circulation, and co-regulation of novel biotechnologies as relatable to forms of bionetworking (for instance judicialization, biohacking, infrastructuring, and digital activism). Bionetworking practices comprise collaborative relationships between scientists, patients, their caretakers, and other actors (including biological, legal, and entrepreneurial ones), to support and/or disqualify promising biotechnologies.
In light of this, the panel provides a platform to discuss the actuality and uses of concepts linked to the STS-field of biocitizenship (Petryna 2013, Novas and Rose 2007) like political economies of hope (Novas 2006); life assemblages (Sleeboom-Faulkner 2014); and adoption space (Gardner et al. 2017). It looks to discuss controversies in areas such as vaccinology, regenerative medicine, gene therapy, translational and precision medicine, microbiome-based therapies, and experimental therapies more broadly. A central point of reflection concerns how tensions between different ways of assessing the efficacy and innovativeness of proposed biotechnologies, and of co-producing medical evidence, might become co-constitutive of biosocialities.
Cited bibliography
Gardner, John; Higham, Ruchi; Faulkner, Alex; Webster, Andrew (2017): Promissory identities: Sociotechnical representations & innovation in regenerative medicine. In: Social science & medicine (1982) 174, S. 70–78.
Novas, Carlos (2006): The Political Economy of Hope: Patients’ Organizations, Science and Biovalue. In: BioSocieties 1 (3), S. 289-305.
Petryna, Adriana (2013): Life exposed. Biological citizens after Chernobyl. New ed. Princeton, N.J, Woodstock: Princeton University Press.
Rose, Nikolas; Novas, Carlos (2007): Biological Citizenship. In: Aihwa Ong und Stephen J. Collier (Hg.): Global Assemblages. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, S. 439–463.
Sleeboom-Faulkner, Margaret (2014): Global Morality and Life Science Practices in Asia. Assemblages of Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan (Health, Technology and Society).