Search results
You are looking at 1 - 4 of 4 items for
- Series: Inscriptions x
- Refine by access: All content x
In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the crusade against sugar rose to prominence as an urgent societal problem about which something needed to be done. Sugar was transformed into the common enemy in a revived ‘war on obesity’ levelled at ‘unhealthy’ foods and the people who enjoy them. Are the evils of sugar based on purely scientific fact, or are other forces at play? Sugar rush explores the social life of sugar in its rise to infamy. The book reveals how competing understandings of the ‘problem’ of sugar are smoothed over through appeals to science and the demonisation of fatness, with politics and popular culture preying on our anxieties about what we eat. Drawing on journalism, government policy, public health campaigns, self-help books, autobiographies and documentaries, the book argues that this rush to blame sugar is a phenomenon of its time, finding fertile ground in the era of austerity and its attendant inequalities. Inviting readers to resist the comforting certainties of the attack on sugar, Sugar rush shows how this actually represents a politics of despair, entrenching rather than disrupting the inequality-riddled status quo.
What does it mean to personalise cancer medicine? Personalised cancer medicine explores this question by foregrounding the experiences of patients, carers and practitioners in the UK. Drawing on an ethnographic study of cancer research and care, we trace patients’, carers’ and practitioners’ efforts to access and interpret novel genomic tests, information and treatments as they craft personal and collective futures. Exploring a series of case studies of diagnostic tests, research and experimental therapies, the book charts the different kinds of care and work involved in efforts to personalise cancer medicine and the ways in which benefits and opportunities are unevenly realised and distributed. Investigating these experiences against a backdrop of policy and professional accounts of the ‘big’ future of personalised healthcare, the authors show how hopes invested and care realised via personalised cancer medicine are multifaceted, contingent and, at times, frustrated in the everyday complexities of living and working with cancer. Tracing the difficult and painstaking work involved in making sense of novel data, results and predictions, we show the different futures crafted across policy, practice and personal accounts. This is the only book to investigate in depth how personalised cancer medicine is reshaping the futures of cancer patients, carers and professionals in uneven and partial ways. Applying a feminist lens that focuses on work and care, inclusions and exclusions, we explore the new kinds of expertise, relationships and collectives involved making personalised cancer medicine work in practice and the inconsistent ways their work is recognised and valued in the process.
This book provides a powerful diagnosis of why the global governance of science struggles in the face of emerging powers. In the field of the life sciences, China and India are both seen as emerging ‘dragons’ and as ‘elephants’. Both countries have formidable resources and are boldly determined to have their presence felt. Yet even when transnational regulatory pledges are made, there often remains an ‘elephant in the room’. Would these scientific ‘dragons’ really abide by the agreed rules? The book provides an essential insight into the logic of science governance in the two countries through unpacking critical events in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. This includes controversies on gene research, stem cell experimental therapies, GM crops, vaccines, the CRISPR technologies and the COVID pandemic. It argues that the ‘subversiveness’ assumed in China’s and India’s rise reflects many of the challenges that are shared by scientific communities worldwide. Previously marginalised actors, both from the Global South and Global North, contest conventional thinking of how science and scientists should be governed. As science outgrows traditional colonies of expertise and authority, good governance necessarily needs to be ‘de-colonised’ to acquire the capacity to think from and with others. By highlighting epistemic injustice within contemporary science, the book extends theories of decolonisation. This book is indispensable for scientists, policy makers and science communicators who are working with or in China and India, and for anyone interested in science-society relations in a global age.
This book explores the nature of decision making in one of the most crucial – yet also the most understudied – aspects of the regulatory system around biomedical research: research ethics committees. Every month, all over the UK, groups of people sit down and decide what kind of research should be carried out on patients within the National Health Service (NHS). These groups – Research Ethics Committees (RECs) – made up of doctors, nurses, researchers, and members of the general public, help shape the future of medicine, and play a crucial role in the regulation of a wide range of research from social science to epidemiology, vaccine and drugs trials, and surgery. Despite coming into existence in the late 1960s, and the considerable literature bemoaning the chilling effect such review has on biomedical research, we don’t know very much about how these bodies make decisions. This book provides one of the first empirical examinations of this kind of regulation, drawing on observational, interview, and archival data to give in-depth ethnographic insight into RECs, as they operate in the UK NHS. A key insight of this work is that, despite the trappings of a modern regulatory system – the operating procedures, guidance documents, and websites – NHS REC decision making revolves around very old-fashioned aspects of social life such as interpersonal trust, reputation, and the performance of character, and that an accurate understanding of this kind of regulation requires an acceptance of the inherently social nature of the processes involved.