2008 Annual Meeting

STS in Urban Development: Actors, Networks and the Re-making of Cities

Until recently, STS studies of the ‘City’ and ‘City-making’ have been relatively rare. However, a generation of STS researchers have started studying architecture, planning and cities with a notable growth in published papers and conference sessions, notably at the 2007 4S conference in Montreal. Generally, however, these explorations have tended to neglect the long-standing analytical approaches to urbanism developed in wider social sciences (e.g. geography, sociology, politics, anthropology). Moreover, STS has often positioned itself as providing an alternative, improved analytical approach to urbanism as a form of co-evolution of urban processes, practices and form.

This session aims to revisit this discussion between disciplines to encourage a discussion about the relations between STS and wider urban studies as either in tension or as mutually enriching in the study of city-making. We welcome papers focusing either on conceptual and methodological debate or theoretically informed case-studies, that explore how actors and networks co-evolve in the making and re-making of cities.

Those who are interested in this session, please send a 400 word abstract by February 10 to:

Simon Guy, University of Manchester, Simon.Guy@manchester.ac.uk or Ola Söderström, Université de Neuchâtel, Ola.Soderstrom@unine.ch

Ethics as Practice

Session organisers: Daniel Neyland (Oxford) and Christian Toennesen
(Oxford)

Ethics has emerged as an increasingly explicit denominator in ways of being, organising, interacting and holding to account. In line with the overall theme of the Conference, in particular acting with science and technology, there is plenty of room for engaging with questions of ethics.

Outside the crowded ethical fields of medicine, bio- and nanotechnology, there seems to be little STS research examining ethics as mundane practice.

We might expect an STS sensibility to portray ethics in terms of an ongoing achievement involving the orchestration and alignment of materialities, (in)formal accountability systems, ex-/inclusion criteria, and vocabularies.
This proposed agenda gives rise to a number of questions:

- What does it mean to be ethical and how do people tinker with, and/or accommodate, competing versions of ethical knowledge?

- How is ethical consistency accomplished within organisational settings?

- What are the methodological challenges faced by researchers who want to study ethics as it unfolds?

-Is it possible to maintain a boundary between, on the one hand, ethical concerns and, on the other, a concern with ethics?

- Can STS make practice more ethical?

These are some of the questions to be addressed in the ethics as practice session, which invites papers exploring what happens when STS and ethics enter into discussion. The session is open to ethnographic and other empirical approaches, as well as theoretically inclined pieces.

Please send an abstract (maximum 300 words) to Daniel Neyland (daniel.neyland@sbs.ox.ac.uk). Deadline for abstract submission is February 10th.

Markets for Public Goods

Session organizers: Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Erasmus MC – University Medical Centre Rotterdam Ine Van Hoyweghen – University of Maastricht Gerard de Vries – University of Amsterdam, Scientific Council for Government Policy (The Hague)

In the last decade radical constructivism has turned towards the study of markets and economic activities in general. STS scholars have focused on the ways in which economics is not merely a form of knowledge that depicts an already existing state of affairs, but a set of instruments and practices that contribute to the making of markets.

This pragmatic turn suggests studies of markets that focus on the ways in which markets are performed by economic principles, programs and devices. This approach to studying markets seems particularly interesting for those areas where normative and public issues are traditionally put center stage: markets for what for many decades in various European countries were considered to be ‘public goods’. Such ‘public goods’ as healthcare and healthcare insurance, public transport, public housing, energy, mail delivery, water management etc. are in Europe increasingly transformed from (largely) state regulated domains to (partly or largely) market regulated ones. These developments vary strongly in different countries, but when seeing markets as carefully composed and crafted spaces in which calculative devices define which worths and issues are ‘brought into the equation’, marketing of public goods seems a fascinating site for studying the performativity of economics and other sciences.

So far, although neoliberal strategies to bring public goods to the market have been studied by Foucault inspired analyses, most studies in the pragmatic STS-analysis of markets have chosen financial markets or other ‘private’ markets as their preferred unit of analysis. Only recently have some studies into the markets for (formerly) public goods been pursued. For this session we want to bring together researchers who are exactly interested in this issue. We invite papers that address questions such as (but not limited to): How are markets being constructed for public goods? Which histories of mixed arrangements are relevant in this process? Which issues are being articulated by calculative devices and how are these issues transformed in their construction? What are the consequences of (new) governance arrangements / materialities for public issues? What does a pragmatic analysis of markets contribute to our thinking about our classic divisions between ‘public’ and ‘private’? What possible roles can STS researchers take up in the construction of markets for public goods?

If you are interested to participate in this session, please send your abstract (max. 400 words) until February 13th 2008 to: zuiderent@bmg.eur.nl or i.vanhoyweghen@zw.unimaas.nl

Governing multiple tissue economies?

Exploring the practices and policies shaping the uses of human tissues and cells in the European Union

(H Busby and K Hoeyer)

This session aims to explore some of the practices and policies through which cells and tissues are classified, procured, stored and deployed, for use in therapy and research. Papers will address these issues primarily in relation to European countries, and will encompass both recent history and current practices of tissue banking, exchange, and production of tissue products in the European Union (EU).

The diverse initiatives surrounding the implementation of EU Directive 2004/23/EC, the ‘Tissues and Cells Directive’ provide one focal point for our exploration of this terrain.  The drive towards regulating products derived from human tissues is (at times) in tension with the traditional basis for tissue banking in individual member states and within the EU itself.  Moves towards standardisation, including those set in motion by the various bodies concerned with the implementation of the Tissues and Cells Directive, encounter diverse contexts, practices and strategies on the ground.

Questions that we aim to explore include the following: How are practices of tissue procurement, banking, and production becoming formalized in new regimes?  How are new regimes shaping relationships between donors and recipients, and-where applicable- ‘producing’ altruism amongst donors. How does the regulation of tissue products that are intended to be placed on the market impact on the more traditional, communitarian framework for tissue banking in the EU? What are some of the (ongoing) tensions between the governance of ‘private’ and ‘public’ forms of tissue banks?

Klaus Hoeyer’s paper will consider the issues around the preparation of and producing of bone (products) in Denmark.  Dana Wilson-Kovacs et al’s paper will focus on the conduct and organization of clinical trials using autologous stem cells for heart repair in Germany and the UK, and will consider similarities and differences in the implementation of the EU tissue directive in both countries in this context. Itziar Alkorta’s paper underlines the diverse ways in which ideals of altruism and solidarity have played out in the implementation, or translation, of the Directive, in different member states, and focuses in particular on the Spanish case. Helen Busby’s paper will explore the implication of classifying patients and users of tissue banks as ‘consumers’ and will explore the conceptualization of and the perspectives of consumers in the cord blood stem cell banking sector in the UK. 

We have space for one additional paper in this session. Please email an abstract to Helen Busby by 8th February if you would like to propose a paper: H.Busby@Nottingham.ac.uk

Acting with science, technology and medicine

Session organizers:

Femke Merkx, Rathenau Institute, science system assessment department, the Hague.
Lotte Asveld, Rathenau Institute, technology assessment department, the Hague.
Tom van der Grinten, Erasmus MC - University Medical Centre Rotterdam

The introduction of new medical technologies in healthcare implies a redefinition of the role responsibilities and accountabilities of the actors involved in the socio-technical networks in which these medical technologies become embedded. Traditional distinctions, such as those between the roles of medical professionals and the roles of other actors, or between the public and the private domain, become increasingly porous as new technologies open up the existing socio-technical network. The question arises whether these changes in configurations of responsibilities are problematic considering the various interests of the actors involved. A main concern are the interests of patients, but other concerns may arise because of conflicts of interests due to changing role responsibilities for other actors, such as may result from a clash between economical rationality and health care rationality.
Apart from reflecting on the quality of actual and expected changes, we can reflect on the quality of the procces by which configurations of responsibilities change. Various arrangements exist that structure and govern how socio-technical networks in healthcare evolve. These arrangements include amongst others the work of advisory councils, hybrid forums, legislative arrangements and financing arrangements. In this session we would like to address the question how such governance arrangements work, how these arrangements play a role in processes of organizing responsibilities, and whether and how these arrangements could be improved considering current developments in healthcare technologies.

Such structural developments include for example:

- the increasing marketization of healthcare provisions
- the rise of predictive and preventive healthcare
- the increasing use of home care technologies
- etc.

We invite papers that:

- present conceptual and methodological approaches to address this topic
- present empirical analyses on the introduction of medical technologies and the related changes in responsibilities and accountabilities
- present empirical analyses on the structure and working of arrangements that govern the introduction of new medical technologies
- discuss evaluative criteria for the quality of governance arrangements
- discuss what specific changes in governance arrangements are needed

If you are interested to participate in this session, please send your abstract (max. 400 words) until February 14th 2008 to:
F.Merkx@rathenau.nl <mailto:F.Merkx@rathenau.nl> and to L.Asveld@rathenau.nl <mailto:L.Asveld@rathenau.nl>

"Standardizing, controlling, and understanding the mouse in biomedical research"

This session will use the laboratory mouse as an object for thinking about stabilization, standardization and control in biomedical research. The mouse is the most widely used model organism in biomedical
pharmaceutical research, and draws together a diverse set of actors into relations with one another, such as researchers with different disciplinary backgrounds and geographic locations, pharmaceutical companies and commercial mouse producers. These papers will explore some aspects of how mouse nomenclature, mouse research, and the mice themselves are stabilized and disciplined. Selling and circulating mice
on a global scale encourages the development of common ways of breeding, naming and using mice, and new databases, quality control measures and reporting procedures have been developed to coordinate mouse research. Efforts to standardize, however, are always partial and incomplete, and tensions remain between the local circumstances of mouse production and use, and narratives of scientific and genetic universality and stability. Researchers from different backgrounds often have conflicting
opinions on what should be controlled, and standardized nomenclatures or protocols are often “torqued” as they are put into practice. These tensions and gaps are not always seen as negative, and local variations
in the way that mice are produced or used can themselves become an important scientific commodity. Thus, looking at the laboratory mouse provides opportunities for thinking about new kinds of coordinating
activities and bodies in biomedical research, and what kinds of (productive) slippages and tensions become salient.

Please send a 500 word (max) abstract to: Monika Cwiartka, UBC, Vancouver, Canada, email: ottillia27@hotmail.com or to Nicole Nelson, Cornell, USA, email: ncn6@cornell.edu