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Vermin, Victims and Disease
This open access book provides the first critical history of the controversy over whether to cull wild badgers to control the spread of bovine tuberculosis (bTB) in British cattle. This question has plagued several professional generations of politicians, policymakers, experts and campaigners since the early 1970s. Questions of what is known, who knows, who cares, who to trust and what to do about this complex problem have been the source of scientific, policy, and increasingly vociferous public debate ever since. This book integrates contemporary history, science and technology studies, human-animal relations, and policy research to conduct a cross-cutting analysis. It explores the worldviews of those involved with animal health, disease ecology and badger protection between the 1970s and 1990s, before reintegrating them to investigate the recent public polarisation of the controversy. Finally it asks how we might move beyond the current impasse.
Personalized Health and Precision Medicine in Practice
So-called personalized health and precision medicine consist of a plethora of distinct endeavors. Ranging from pharmacogenomics to big data medicine, these endeavors are set out to tailor treatment and prevention to different combinations of data on the biological, behavioral, social, and environmental determinants of health. Currently reaching the trial of implementation across a diverse range of local and national contexts, these innovations call for a thorough empirical scrutiny of the normative, practical, and technical reconfigurations that they engender. Personalized/precision approaches to medicine demand substantive, normative work that consists in reforming social contracts in healthcare, and in ensuring a consistent commitment to change from both institutional actors and citizens.
Precision Oncology and Cancer Biomarkers
This open access book reflects on matters of social and ethical concern raised in the daily practices of those working in and around precision oncology. Each chapter addresses the experiences, concerns and issues at stake for people who work in settings where precision oncology is practiced, enacted, imagined or discussed. It subsequently discusses and analyses bioethical dilemmas, scientific challenges and economic trade-offs, the need for new policies, further technological innovation, social work, as well as phenomenological research. This volume takes a broad actor-centred perspective as, whenever cancer is present, the range of actors with issues at stake appears almost unlimited. This ...
Feeling Machines
In recent years, debates over healthcare have accompanied rapid advances in technology, from the expansion of telehealth services to artificial intelligence driven diagnostics. In this book, Shawn Bender delves into the world of Japanese robots engineered for care. Care robots (kaigo robotto) emerged early in the 21st century, when roboticists began converting assembly line technologies into responsive machines for older adults and people with disabilities. These robots are meant to be felt and programmed to feel. While some greet them with enthusiasm, others fear that they might replace a fundamentally human task. Based on fieldwork in Japan, Denmark, and Germany, Bender traces the emergenc...
Living with Alzheimer's
News of Alzheimer’s disease is constantly in the headlines. Every day we hear heart-wrenching stories of people caring for a loved one who has become a shell of their former self, of projections about rising incidence rates, and of cures that are just around the corner. However, we don't see or hear from the people who actually have the disease. In Living with Alzheimer’s, Renée L. Beard argues that the exclusively negative portrayals of Alzheimer’s are grossly inaccurate. To understand what life with memory loss is really like, Beard draws on intensive observations of nearly 100 seniors undergoing cognitive evaluation, as well as post-diagnosis interviews with individuals experiencin...
Animal Housing and Human–Animal Relations
This book provides an in-depth investigation into the practices of animal housing systems with international contributions from across the humanities and social sciences. By attending to a range of different sites such as the zoo, the laboratory, the farm and the animal shelter, to name a few, the book explores material technologies from the perspective that these are integrated parts of a larger biopolitical infrastructure and questions how animal housing systems, and the physical infrastructures that surround central human-animal practices, come into being. Chapter 11 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 3.0 license.
The Politics of Potential
The first one thousand days of human life, or the period between conception and age two, is one of the most pivotal periods of human development. Optimizing nutrition during this time not only prevents childhood malnutrition but also determines future health and potential. The Politics of Potential examines early life interventions in the first one thousand days of life in South Africa, drawing on fieldwork from international conferences, government offices, health-care facilities, and the everyday lives of fifteen women and their families in Cape Town. Michelle Pentecost explores various aspects of a politics of potential, a term that underlines the first one thousand days concept and its e...
The Cancer Within
The Cancer Within examines cervical cancer in Romania as a point of entry into an anthropological reflection on contemporary health care. Cervical cancer prevention reveals the inner workings of emerging post-communist medicine, which aligns the state and the market, public and private health care providers, policy makers, and ordinary women. Fashioned by patriarchal relations, lived religion, and the historical trauma of pronatalism, Romanian women’s responses to reproductive medicine and cervical cancer prevention are complicated by neoliberal reforms to medical care. Cervical cancer prevention – and especially the HPV vaccination – provided Romanians a legitimate instance to express their conflicting views of post-communist medicine. What sets Romania apart is that pronatalism, patriarchy, lived religion, medical reforms, and moral contestation of preventive medicine bring into line systemic contingencies that expose the historical, social, and cultural trajectories of cervical cancer.
Making Uncertainty
In Cape Town, South Africa, many people with tuberculosis also use substances. This sets up a seemingly impossible problem: People who use substances are at increased risk of tuberculosis disease; and substance use seems to result in erratic behavior that makes successful treatment of people affected by tuberculosis extremely difficult. People affected don’t get healthy, healthcare providers are frustrated, and families seek to balance love and care for those who are ill with self-protection. How are we to understand this? Where does the responsibility for poor health and healing lie? What are the possibilities for an effective healthcare response? Through a close look at lives and care, Making Uncertainty: Tuberculosis, Substance Use, and Pathways to Health shows how patterns of substance use, tuberculosis disease, and their interaction are shaped by history, social context, and political economy. This, in turn, generates new perspectives on what makes poor health, and what good care might look like.
Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration
Interdisciplinarity has become a buzzword in academia, as research universities funnel their financial resources toward collaborations between faculty in different disciplines. In theory, interdisciplinary collaboration breaks down artificial divisions between different departments, allowing more innovative and sophisticated research to flourish. But does it actually work this way in practice? Investigating Interdisciplinary Collaboration puts the common beliefs about such research to the test, using empirical data gathered by scholars from the United States, Canada, and Great Britain. The book’s contributors critically interrogate the assumptions underlying the fervor for interdisciplinarity. Their attentive scholarship reveals how, for all its potential benefits, interdisciplinary collaboration is neither immune to academia’s status hierarchies, nor a simple antidote to the alleged shortcomings of disciplinary study. Chapter 10 is available Open Access here (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK395883)
