About the Book
Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for the study of the making of values in society, exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine and asking how values are at play.
This means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals and publics regularly do, in order to define what counts as proper conduct in science and health care, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing.
A number of analytical and methodological means to investigate these concerns are presented. The editors introduce a way to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the enacting, ordering and displacing of values. They argue that a research programme of this kind, makes it possible to move orthogonally to the question of what values are, and thus ask how they are constituted. This rectifies some central problems that arise with approaches that depend on stabilized understandings of value. At the heart of it, such a research programme encourages the examination of how and with what means certain things come to count as valuable and desirable, how registers of value are ordered as well as displaced. It further encourages a sense that these matters could be, and sometimes simultaneously are, otherwise.
Table of Contents:
1: Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Francis Lee, and Steve Woolgar: On the Omnipresence, Diversity, and Elusiveness of Values in the Life Sciences and Medicine
Part I: Conflicted "Public" Values
2: Sergio Sismondo: Key Opinion Leaders: Valuing Independence and Conflict of Interest in the Medical Sciences
3: Christer Nordlund: The Moral Economy of a Miracle Drug: On Exchange Relationships Between Medical Science and the Pharmaceutical Industry in the 1940s
4: Sven Widmalm: The Third Manuscript: Rules of Conduct and the Fact-Value Distinction in Mid-20th Century Biochemistry
Part II: Markets as Carers for Health
5: Philip Roscoe: A Moral Economy of Transplantation: Competing Regimes of Value in the Allocation of Transplant Organs
6: Teun Zuiderent-Jerak, Kor Grit and Tom van der Grinten: Critical Composition of Public Values: On the Enactment and Disarticulation of What Counts in Healthcare Markets
7: Daniel Neyland and Elena Simakova: The Mosquito Multiple: Malaria and Market-Based Initiatives
Part III: Valuing Human and Non-Human Bodies
8: Carrie Friese: Genetic Value: The Moral Economies of Cloning in the Zoo
9: Kristin Asdal: Enacting Values from the Sea: On Innovation Devices, Value Practices and the Co-Modifications of Markets and Bodies in Aquaculture
10: Ilana Lowy: Norms, Values And Constraints: The Case of Prenatal Diagnosis
Part IV: Valuations and Knowledge
11: Francis Lee: On Relational Work and Epistemic Value in the Biomedical Science
12: Claes-Fredrik Helgesson and Linus Johansson Krafve: Data Transfer, Values and the Holding Together of Clinical Registry Networks
13: Isabelle Dussauge: Valuation Machines: Economies of Desire/Pleasure in Contemporary Neuroscience
14: Isabelle Dussauge, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, and Francis Lee: Valuography: Studying the Making of Values
About the Author :
Isabelle Dussauge is a researcher at the Center for Gender Research at the University of Uppsala. Her primary research interests are in the science and politics of the body, at the intersection of science and technology studies, gender studies, and the history of medicine. She has worked with visualization in medicine; the early computerization of health care; and the place of the brain in contemporary culture. She is currently concluding the research project
entitled "Brain Desires ", a critical inquiry into the contemporary neurosciences of sexuality and pleasure.
Claes-Fredrik Helgesson is professor in Technology and Social Change at Linkoping University, Sweden. His research interest concerns the intertwining of economic organising, science and technology. The theoretical inspiration comes primarily from economic sociology and social studies of science and technology (STS). His current project "Trials of Value " together with Francis Lee, investigates the designing of controlled medical experiments as a site where scientific, medical and economic
values at play when establishing what knowledge is worth pursuing. Helgesson is co-founder and co-editor of Valuation Studies, a new open access journal, which published its first issue in spring 2013.
Francis Lee is assistant professor at the Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change at Linko?ping University, Sweden. His primary research interests are in the practices, politics and technologies of knowledge. His work has dealt with the valuation of knowledge in the biosciences, epistemic standards in education, and exclusion in sociotechnical processes. He is currently studying research design as a valuation of biomedical knowledge in the project "Trials of Value" with
C-F Helgesson.
Review :
People's and societies' values arent fixed and innate. They are forged in practice,in every day settings, and often as the result of conflict. This important new book focusses on exactly how this happens.
In spite of routine attempts to neatly separate facts from values in the course of debates and controversies, decades of work in the field of Science & Technology Studies have led to the increasing recognition that these two components are closely intertwined. This insight, however, has more often than not been used as a starting point for analyzing the production of facts, taking values for granted. This volume addresses this glaring imbalance. Recognizing that values are the outcome, not the cause, of valuation practices, and following up on recent calls to shift attention from matters of fact to matters of concern, the authors of this collection, in their own distinctive ways, explore how different kinds of values are generated, modified, performed, assembled, and articulated with epistemic matters in a variety of settings.
Life sciences are saturated with value talks. This book provides insights into practices, and devices, through which what matters, how and to whom, are shaped and dealt with in a variety of sites. From a cod farm to healthcare markets, from algorithms allocating organs to be transplanted to clinical registry networks, it makes the reader literally sense that values do not stand out there, but are deeply ingrained in the making of life sciences. And this book does more: it offers an attractive program to the field of valuation studies, which hopefully, will come to fruition in the near future.
The era of small government and big economy is a testing time for STS. Do we live in post-critical times? Maybe. Irrespective of our disagreements over the fate of skepticism, we need to grind new analytic lenses. This book, which helps us see that epistemic practices are a species of valuation practices, refracts valuing in new ways.
