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Proceedings from the São Paulo School of Advanced Science on Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the Governance of Life Sciences --- Anais da Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada em Biotecnologia, Biossociabilidade e Governança em Ciências da Vida
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SPSAS Proceedings Anais da ESPCA organized by Raquel Velho
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Page 1: ESPCA Proceedings

SPSAS Proceedings!Anais da ESPCA

organized by Raquel Velho

Page 2: ESPCA Proceedings

!!

A Brief Introduction!!The São Paulo School of Advanced Sciences on Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the Governance of the Life Sciences took place in the State University of Campinas (Brazil) on August 11-15 2014. !This five day summer school brought together leading experts from across a broad field of the social and historical sciences (including Anthropology, Sociology, Science and Technology Studies, Political Science, History of Science) from world class research and educational institutes inside and outside Brazil. A combination of students from Brazil and abroad participated in discussions relating to the rapid developments in the life and medical sciences and in the fields of genomics and biotechnology. These developments have raised important social, political, legal and ethical issues across global and in transnational contexts. We had a mixed programme of talks and workshops with an emphasis on interactive dialogue with professors and students the school responded to the urgent need to provide training and education that can address some of the pressing social and ethical issues raised by developments in the life and medical sciences. !What you have before you is a compilation of short think-pieces written by some of the students who participated in the course. Due to the heterogeneous mix of nationalities, submissions in either English or Portuguese were accepted (sometimes both!). Papers have been categorised in three different groups: • Paper-oriented: these address the students’ own work, and how it connected with the themes

explored by the summer school. • School-oriented: these address the themes most discussed at the school itself, with thoughts on

how discussions helped the student find new directions in their own research. • Free expression: these are absolutely free – they can include reviews, drawings, short fictions –

which in some way address the themes of the school. !We hope this collection of work will give readers a general idea of the range of debates and themes we tackled throughout the five days. The students would like to thank the senior academics for their stimulating lectures, and the organisers of the SPSAS for a thought-provoking event, where new networks were forged as well as new friendships. !The school was funded by FAPESP, and supported by UCL (University College London) and Unicamp (the State University of Campinas). !Event organisers: Maria Conceição da Costa, Sahra Gibbon, Marko Monteiro. Proceedings organiser: Raquel Velho !!!

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!!

Uma Breve Introdução!!A Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada em Biotecnologia, Biossociabilidade e Governança em Ciências da Vida ocorreu dos dias 11 a 15 de Agosto de 2014, na Universidade Estadual de Campinas (Brasil). !Esta escola de verão de cinco dias reuniu acadêmicos e especialistas de uma grande variedade disciplinar das ciências humanas e sociais (incluindo Antropologia, Sociologia, Estudos da Ciência e da Tecnologia, Ciência Política, História da ciência) de institutos de pesquisa de excelência nacionais e internacionais. Uma combinação de alunos do Brasil e do exterior participaram em discussões de temas relacionados às intensas transformações no campo da biotecnologia e das ciências da vida. Estes desenvolvimentos resultaram em questões sociais, políticas, legais e éticas importantes em contextos globais e transnacionais. Tivemos um programa misto de palestras e grupos de discussão com a ênfase em diálogos entre professores e alunos, que respondeu à necessidade de providenciar educação e aperfeiçoamento que possa falar para alguns dos problemas éticos e sociais causados pelos recentes desenvolvimentos das ciências médicas e da vida. !Neste documento, o leitor encontrará uma compilação de curtos textos da autoria de alguns alunos que participaram do curso. Devida à mistura heterogênea de nacionalidades, aceitamos submissões em inglês ou em português (e em alguns casos, ambos!). Os artigos foram categorizados em três grupos: • Orientados pelo paper: estes dão ênfase ao trabalho dos alunos, e seus vínculos com os temas

explorados pela escola de verão. • Orientados pela escola: estes dão ênfase aos temas discutidos durante os seminários, e como

estas discussões ajudaram o aluno a achar novas direções em sua própria pesquisa. • Expressão livre: estes são absolutamente livres – podem incluir críticas, desenhos, crônicas – que

abordam de alguma maneira os temas da escola. !Esperamos que esta coleção de trabalhos dê aos leitores uma idéia geral do vasto alcance de debates e temas que enfrentamos durante os cinco dias de curso. Os alunos gostariam de agradecer os professores pelas palestras empolgantes, e os organizadores da ESPCA pelo evento inspirados, onde criamos novas redes assim como novas amizades. !A escola foi patrocinada pela FAPESP, e realizada com apoio da UCL (University College London) e Unicamp (Universidade Estadual de Campinas). !Organizadores do evento: Maria Conceição da Costa, Sahra Gibbon, Marko Monteiro. Organizadora dos anais: Raquel Velho.

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!Table of Contents!

!Paper-Oriented Think Pieces! 5!

Disability Film Festivals: biological identity(ies) and heterotopia!Ana Cristina Bohrer Gilbert! 5!.......................................................................................

Células da Esperança: Um estudo antropológico sobre bancos de sangue do cordão umbilical!

Angela Vasconi Speroni! 7!...........................................................................................The Search for Origins: Adoptees and People Conceived with Help of Donor

Negotiating Kinship and Identities!Débora Allebrandt! 9!.....................................................................................................

Drugs, Science and Mediations – Ethnography of a Research Center and the Production of Chemical Reference Substances!

Eduardo Doering Zanella! 11!........................................................................................Mental Health as a mode of production of existence: the case of depression!

Elton Corbanezi! 13!......................................................................................................Biotechnoscience in Context: Co-production of Science and the state in India!

Jawhar CT! 14!..............................................................................................................Entre corpos, subjetividades e tecnologias do emagrecimento: medicalização e

governamentalidade em torno da gordura corporal!Juliana Loureiro de Oliveira! 16!....................................................................................

A “metanarrativa inconsciente”: o caso do neodarwinismo.!Leandro Modolo Paschoalotte! 18!................................................................................

On Their Own Terms: Dignitas and the Institutionalisation of Assisted Suicide!Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves! 20!...........................................................................

From Depression to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Notes on Ritalin Promotion and Advertisement!

Miguel Hexel Herrera! 22!..............................................................................................Os Desdobramentos Éticos do Tecnicismo Moderno: Um Diálogo Crítico entre Hans

Jonas e Martin Heidegger!Roberta Soares Nazário da Silva! 24!...........................................................................

Project: Family, Health and Activism in the Age of Genomics!Waleska Aureliano! 26!..................................................................................................

School-Oriented Think Pieces! 28! ESPCA and the Future!

Amelia Hassoun! 28!.....................................................................................................The Public Intellectual – A short reflection on the role of the STS scholar!

Christiaan de Koning! 30!..............................................................................................�3

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Connecting the dots: field mapping, network and community building !Gabriela Bortz! 32!.........................................................................................................

Whose Dreams Are These? The Importance of Governing Beyond Risk!Lisa Cockburn! 34!.........................................................................................................

ESPCA: Reflections on Power and Politics!Melissa Creary! 36!........................................................................................................

Socially Engaged STS and the Value of North-South Collaborations!Roberto Toledo! 38!.......................................................................................................

São Paulo Advanced School on Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the Governance of the Life Sciences, August 11th - 15th!

Rodrigo Saraiva Cheida! 39!.........................................................................................Governing novelty: where does bureaucracy fit?!

Rosanna Dent! 41!.........................................................................................................

Free Expression Pieces! 43! Genome!

Lucia Ariza! 43!..............................................................................................................Activism and Academia!

Raquel Velho! 44!..........................................................................................................Review of ‘The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our

time’ (1944) by Karl Polanyi - A book for lesser social scientists?!Samantha Vanderslott ! 46...........................................................................................

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Paper-Oriented Think Pieces!!

Disability Film Festivals: biological identity(ies) and heterotopia!

Ana Cristina Bohrer Gilbert Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Cultural Studies

Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (PACC-UFRJ) Research Fellow in the Department of Genetics

Fernandes Figueira Institute/FIOCRUZ !The topics addressed by the São Paulo School of Advanced Sciences on Biotechnology,

Biosocialities and the Governance of Life Sciences related to the recent developments in the life

and medical sciences contributed to the discussion of fundamental issues for the disability arena.

The possibility of reshaping aspects such as metabolism, organs, development, that is,

human vitality at the molecular scale as a means of enhancement goes beyond the the polarity

health-illness. In addition, a greater presence in the mass media of genetic arguments related to

aspects such as behaviour, habits, health and illnesses modify how bodies are understood and define

what authors, such as Nikolas Rose among others, named as biological citizens. These individuals 1

group themselves in communities —different 'bioscapes' — which configure new territories for 2

administering individual and collective existence. This movement results in the consolidation of

plural truths, capable of dislocating hierarchical axes and promoting loss of hegemony of the

biomedical discourse. In that sense, these groups become experts in a kind of knowledge combining

scientific knowledge and experience . 3

In this scenario, the (illusory) idea of a sole, universal, self-enclosed body, through which

individuals can identify themselves and understand others, is disarticulated and requires from all of

us to rethink the model of human body that serves as a basis for practices and discourses, including

the scientific discourse.

This is particular important when talking about disability(ies). In the case of disability film

festivals the focus is less on the geographic territory of film production than on the territory of

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Rose, Nikolas (2007) The Politics of Life Itself. Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. 1

Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Burri, Regula V. & Dumit, Joseph (2007) Epilogue: Indeterminate Lives, Demands, Relations: Emergent Bioscapes. In 2

Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life. New York: Routledge. p. 223-28.

Rabinow, Paul (1992) Artificiality and Enlightenment: from Sociobiology to Biosociality. In Crary, J. & Kwinter, S. 3

(Eds.) Incorporations. New York: Zone Books. p. 234-52.

Page 7: ESPCA Proceedings

biological identity, summarised by the category 'disability' which assembles a collection of diverse

bioscapes in contemporary biopolitics.

Disability festivals intend to be spaces of an alternative order, or heterotopic spaces, for non-

normative bodies that question ideas of normality and cultural (and discursive) sites of disability , 4

and offer new understandings of the human bodies. For that purpose, the festivals engage in the

production of new discourses of truth through which people with (and without) disabilities can 5

think of and understand themselves in a different way, remodelling their identities.

In a counter-tendency to the discourses of risk and the expanding definition of personhood

in somatic terms, characteristic of the contemporary vital politics, disability festivals define people

with disabilities not by what is different—organic, biological, physical or intellectual marks—but

by what they share with other human beings—subjectivity, feelings, dramas. However, the presence

of diagnostic categories and specific somatic realities do not permit a radical break with the

biomedical domain. It demands a reflection on the kind of narratives that are disseminated in those

events, which reveal forms of understanding people with disabilities expressed through vocabulary,

rhetoric, knowledge, morality and technologies . 6

The discourses on difference and diversity and the search for inclusion have multiple

repercussions, especially in relation to a delicate balance between 'same' and 'different'. The

plasticity of bodies and the flexibility of identities brought about by the molecular style of thought , 7

impel to questioning the sole model for the human body entangled with the definition of normal

based on the polarity disable-able bodied. This means to make explicit the frames used to perceive

the world and, consequently, disability, and to reflect on what kind of definition of personhood is

culturally shared and whether it includes human variability.

!

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Snyder, Sharon L. & Mitchell, David T. (2006) Cultural locations of disability. Chicago and London: The University 4

of Chicago Press.

Foucault, Michel (2003) Technologies of the Self. In Rabinow, Paul & Rose, Nikolas (Eds.) The Essential Foucault: 5

Selection from Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984. New York: The New Press. p. 145-69.

Miller, Peter & Rose, Nikolas (2008) Governing economic life. In Governing the Present: Administering Economic, 6

Social and Personal Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. p. 26-52.

Fleck, Ludwik (1981) Genesis and Development of a Scientific Fact. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. 7

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!!Células da Esperança: Um estudo antropológico sobre bancos

de sangue do cordão umbilical !8Angela Vasconi Speroni

Instituto de Estudos em Saúde Coletiva Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro !

A terapia celular desponta como a grande revolução da biomedicina do século XXI. Após o boom

dos estudos no campo da genética, o foco da comunidade científica se deslocou para as pesquisas

com células-tronco. No contexto de uma medicina que pretende-se personalizada, o protagonismo

destas células decorre das promessas de uma tecnologia regenerativa, capaz de superar os desafios

do adoecer e do envelhecimento, mediante uma fonte potencialmente ilimitada de tecidos para

transplantes. Frente aos embates éticos e legais em torno da utilização de células embrionárias , a 9

partir da década de 1980 o sangue do cordão umbilical e placentário de recém-nascidos tornou-se

fonte alternativa de células-tronco.

Em 2001, surgiram os primeiros bancos de armazenamento do cordão umbilical no Brasil,

na sequência de um movimento internacional iniciado na década de 1990, nos Estados Unidos. No

Brasil existem os bancos públicos constituintes da Rede BrasilCord e bancos privados, que

armazenam células-tronco do sangue do cordão umbilical apenas para uso do próprio doador ou de

parentes. Nos bancos públicos, as células são provenientes de doações e podem ser utilizadas por

qualquer pessoa compatível, ou pelo próprio doador e familiares, caso ainda estejam disponíveis.

Atualmente mais de cinquenta países contam com bancos deste tipo e a demanda cresce

progressivamente ao redor do mundo. Segundo informações de uma organização norte-americana

sem fins lucrativos, a Parent’s Guide to Cord Blood Foundation , atualmente existem 158 bancos 10

públicos, localizados em 36 países, e 176 bancos privados, localizados em 51 países e com mercado

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Este trabalho decorre do meu projeto de pesquisa para o doutorado em Saúde Coletiva pelo Instituto de Estudos em 8

Saúde Coletiva da Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (IESC/UFRJ), sob a orientação da Profa. Rachel Aisengart Menezes. O estudo é financiado pela Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES), mediante concessão de bolsa de doutorado.

Os cientistas classificam as células-tronco humanas em três tipos: CTs totipotentes, também conhecidas como zigoto, 9

uma única célula que pode dar origem a um ser humano completo, a partir de sua implantação no útero; CTs embrionárias ou pluripotentes, que derivam da massa celular interna de um embrião, com cinco a sete dias de fecundação, e são capazes de originar todas as células e tecidos do corpo humano; e CTs adultas ou multipotentes, que se constituem em estágios posteriores do desenvolvimento, encontram-se em regiões distintas do corpo e têm capacidade de gerar subtipos celulares dos tecidos dos quais originaram (Rehen, Paulsen, 2007).

Informações disponíveis no site: http://parentsguidecordblood.org/. Acesso em: 27 mai. 2014.10

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ampliado para mais 37 países. Ao todo, estão armazenadas mais de 646 mil unidades em bancos

públicos e mais de 3 milhões e 66 mil em bancos privados.

Neste cenário, os meios de comunicação de massa consistem em veículos centrais, na

disseminação das promessas da “medicina que faz milagres” (Neiva, 2006), em referência aos

tratamentos com células-tronco. Por outro lado, pesquisadores da área mostram-se cautelosos, ao

afirmar que a maior parte dos procedimentos é ainda experimental e seus riscos permanecem

desconhecidos, e alertam para o fato de que informações sobre pesquisas e ensaios clínicos estão

sendo precocemente promovidas e divulgadas, promovendo uma extensa mobilização de doentes e

seus familiares em torno das promessas das “células da esperança” . 11

No contexto deste novo mercado da saúde, os bancos privados investem milhões no

financiamento de estudos que comprovem a eficácia de terapias com células-tronco, bem como na

divulgação de seus resultados a possíveis clientes, por médicos obstetras, via distribuição de

prospectos e folders, marketing direto em páginas na internet, até a oferta de cursos gratuitos para

gestantes e seus acompanhantes. Em contrapartida, a Agência Nacional de Vigilância em Saúde –

órgão que regulamenta este tipo de atividade no país – se esforça para desmistificar certas

mensagens, revelando os limites da tecnologia celular, no sentido de “ajudar os futuros pais a tomar

uma decisão consciente” (ANVISA, 2013).

Diante destes achados, o objetivo central do meu projeto de pesquisa consiste em apreender

crenças e expectativas que sustentam a esperança presente em discursos e demandas dos diferentes

atores sociais envolvidos – pesquisadores do campo, médicos obstetras, técnicos dos bancos e

casais que optam ou não pelo armazenamento –, mediante as seguintes fontes de dados:

levantamento da literatura científica acerca das pesquisas com células-tronco e estudos clínicos em

desenvolvimento no país; observação de eventos científicos da área; análise de notícias divulgadas

pelos meios de comunicação de massa; e entrevistas semiestruturadas.

!ANVISA - Agência Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária. Conhecendo os bancos de sangue do cordão

umbilical e placentário. Brasília: ANVISA, 2013. Disponível em: <http://portal.anvisa.gov.br/wps/wcm/connect/c06a45004fbdb63eb683f79a71dcc661/banco_de_cordoes_final.pdf?MOD=AJPERES >. Acesso em: 05 jun. 2013.

NEIVA, P. A medicina que faz milagres. Revista Veja, São Paulo, 23 nov. 2006. REHEN, S., PAULSEN, B. Células-tronco: O que são? Para que servem? Rio de Janeiro: Vieira & Lent,

2007.

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Termo apropriado da cartilha informativa sobre bancos de sangue do cordão umbilical e placentário da Agência 11

Nacional de Vigilância Sanitária (ANVISA, 2013).

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The Search for Origins: Adoptees and People Conceived with Help of Donor Negotiating Kinship and Identities!

Débora Allebrandt Post-doctoral fellow at the Anthropology Department

UFRGS !Genetics is an idiom that underlies an important part of the discourses and decisions taken by

adoptees and people conceived with the help of a donor in the pursuit of their biological origins. In

the field research conducted for my doctoral thesis, I compare the search for origins by adoptees

with that of people conceived through medically assisted techniques and donor gametes in Brazil

and Quebec. In this thesis, I focus specifically on the case of adoptees and their strategies for

locating their biological parents and thus discovering their genetic backgrounds (Allebrandt, 2013).

Genetics related to family and health, especially in the adoptive context, can evoke polarized

positions. In the midst of debate, it becomes evident that modern science, as a producer of "truth",

plays an influential role in the desire to know one’s origins and dissect one’s genealogical roots. The

genetic argument is strong and increasingly plays a role in social identity (Bamford & Leach, 2009).

At the same time, family arrangements that appear to ignore biological and genetic factors exert

influence in another direction. The debates around health and kinship, often couched in an implicit

opposition between radical biologism and the super valorization of socio-affective relations, are

addressed and in my more extensive works. Inspired in the narratives of my interlocutors, I consider

the legal and cultural contexts of Brazil and Quebec care linked to national styles that inform not

only practices, but also the meaning of the adoptee’s search for his or her biogenetic origins (Fleck,

2008; Jasanoff, 2005).

I'm currently conducting further investigation on the issues of intimacy and privacy that

dialogue with the choice of an anonymous donor and exploring the many factors at play in this sort

of “choice” .In this sense, family configurations, life histories, and health experiences as well as

physical and behavioral similarities appear as forces that produce a dynamic perception of genes,

their importance and meaning.

!Em Busca das Origens: Adotados e Pessoas Concebindas com Gametas Doados Negociando

Parentesco e Identidades

!

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Genética é um idioma que está subjacente a uma parte importante dos discursos e decisões tomadas

pelos adotados e de pessoas concebidas com a ajuda de um doador em busca de suas origens

biológicas. Na pesquisa de campo realizada para minha tese de doutorado, eu comparo a busca das

origens de adotados com a de pessoas concebidas com gametas doados através de técnicas de

reprodução assistida no Brasil e Quebec. Nesta tese, me concentrei especificamente sobre o caso de

adotados e suas estratégias para a localização de seus pais biológicos e, assim, descobrir suas

origens genéticas (Allebrandt de 2013).

O conhecimento genético, relacionado à família e à saúde, especialmente no contexto da

adoção, pode produzir posições polarizadas. Neste debate, torna-se evidente que a ciência moderna,

como produtor de "verdade", desempenha um papel influente no desejo de conhecer as origens e

raízes genealógicas. O argumento genético é cada vez mais forte e tem um papel na identidade

social (Bamford e Leach 2009). Ao mesmo tempo, os arranjos familiares que parecem ignorar

fatores biológicos e genéticos exercem influência em outra direção. Os debates em torno da saúde e

de parentesco, muitas vezes tomado em oposição implícita entre biologismo radical e a

supervalorização das relações sócio-afectivas, são abordados nos meus trabalhos mais extensos.

Inspirada nas narrativas dos meus interlocutores, considero os contextos legais e culturais do Brasil

e do Quebec, como ligados a estilos nacionais que informam não apenas práticas, mas também o

sentido da busca do adotado por suas origens biogenéticas (Fleck 2008, Jasanoff 2005).

Estou atualmente conduzindo uma investigação mais aprofundada sobre as questões da

intimidade e privacidade que o diálogo com a escolha de um doador anônimo e explorando os

muitos fatores em jogo neste tipo de "escolha". Neste sentido, configurações familiares, histórias de

vida e saúde experiências, bem como semelhanças físicas e comportamentais aparecem como forças

que produzem uma percepção dinâmica dos genes, sua importância e significado.

!Allebrandt, D. (2013). Parenté Fluide: la quête des origines au Brésil et au Québec. Dialogue entre

parenté, droit et science. Université de Montréal. Retrieved from http://hdl.handle.net/

1866/10210

Bamford, S., & Leach, J. (2009). Kinship and Beyond: The Genealogical Model Reconsidered

(Fertility, Reproduction and Sexuality) (p. 264). New York!; Oxford: Berghahn Books.

Fleck, L. (2008). Genèse et développement d’un fait scientifique. Champs sciences (p. 280–). Paris:

Flammarion.

Jasanoff, S. (2005). Designs on nature!: science and democracy in Europe and the United States (p.

374). Princeton, N.J.!; Woodstock: Princeton University Press. �10

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Drugs, Science and Mediations – Ethnography of a Research Center and the Production of Chemical Reference Substances!

Eduardo Doering Zanella Master in Social Anthropology

UFRGS !My master thesis, defended on May 5, 2014, at the “Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia

Social” of the “Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul” (UFRGS), was an ethnography

developed with a collective of researchers of the health sciences, specialized on the theme "alcohol

and drugs" (ZANELLA, 2014). It is the “Centro de Pesquisa em Álcool e Drogas” (CPAD),

connected to the Department of Psychiatry, UFRGS, and located at the “Unidade Álvaro Alvim” of

the “Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre” (HCPA).

This research center is composed of a network of about forty researchers. They are mainly

psychiatrists and psychologists, although there are also professionals with formation in the fields of

social assistance, nursing, economics and biomedicine. Its activities are quite diverse, including:

organization of academic events such as symposia, conferences and seminars; training of students,

health managers, traffic officers and civilian and military police on the theme "alcohol and drugs";

organization and planning of treatment for chemical dependency at the “Hospital de Clínicas de

Porto Alegre”; and also the conduction academic researches.

The studies of this research center are developed mainly in the fields of psychiatry,

epidemiology, genetics, neuroscience and toxicology. Thus, these projects have several objectives in

relation to drugs: assess associations between psychiatric comorbidity and the use of these

substances; estimate their relationships with genetic polymorphisms; define patterns of use and

socio demographic profiles for certain regions and populations of drug users; validate instruments

for research and for clinical evaluation of drug users; indicate risk factors and economic costs

related to the practices of drug use; among many others. These researches are developed with

respect to various substances: alcohol, crack, cocaine, marijuana, synthetic drugs (especially

ecstasy) and tobacco.

My ethnographic research conducted with this collective of scientists sought to follow,

through participation, direct observation, interviews and document analysis, the processes that

involves the production of medical and scientific knowledge about drugs. Taking as its starting

point that drugs are not pre-existing entities, but substances that take a particular shape derived

from the realization of heterogeneous articulations, I proposed to describe mediation processes

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involving such substances. I intended to understand the differences and changes that are made to

these objects in the projects and activities of CPAD.

For this, I focused on two cases: a partnership between the “Departamento Estadual de

Trânsito do Rio Grande do Sul” (Detran-RS) and CPAD, and a data collection undertaken with drug

users, admitted to chemical dependency treatment at the “Hospital de Clínicas de Porto Alegre”.

Among the considerations developed in this work, I argued that the transformation or differentiation

of the drugs "themselves" also modifies what is on their "surroundings", in such a way that nature

and society are mutually produced in processes of mediation.

In order to continue this work, my goal now is to address a project realized by a research

group that is a partner of CPAD, the Labtoxico – “Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisa em Toxicologia

Analítico Laboratorial”, conducted in collaboration with the Federal Police of Brazil. It is an ample

enterprise, whose master objective is the production of chemical reference substances, in particular

cocaine hydrochloride. The production of this substance is intended to provide a uniform standard,

to be used as a parameter for establishing comparisons with the cocaine/crack apprehended from

drug trafficking. Through these comparisons, it is intended the evaluation of the specificities of the

chemical compositions of illegal drugs that are sold on the streets, in a way that will be possible to

point to their routes of circulation and thus engender the trace of the drug trafficking system.

The aim of my research is to follow this lab cocaine, since its production to its mobilization

by the Federal Police of Brazil. The purpose is to understand how the State, science and drug

trafficking are articulated and co-produced around this key substance.

!!References:

LATOUR, Bruno. Reassembling the social – an introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. New York:

Oxford University Press, 2005.

ZANELLA, Eduardo. Práticas, mediações e substâncias – “álcool” e “drogas” nas atividades de um

coletivo de pesquisadores. Dissertação de mestrado defendida pelo Programa de Pós-

Graduação em Antropologia Social. UFRGS, 2014

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Mental Health as a mode of production of existence: the case of depression!Elton Corbanezi

Doctoral student in Sociology at IFCH/Unicamp Unicamp

com apoio financeiro do CNPq !My research aims to analyse and relate three notions: mental health, depression and biopolitics.

From a historical and genealogical perspective, I intend to understand and problematize the

construction and the consolidation of the contemporary notion of mental health. A result of a large

and dynamic process of deinstitutionalization of mental illness, mental health quickly becomes a

device of intervention no longer restricted to the domain of pathological. Within this concept –

which is presented by the World Health Organization (WHO) as the need to constantly overcome

the normalities and the ability of self-realization in all dimensions of sociability – is the normality

itself that also represents the object of medical intervention under the pretext of prevention and

production of welfare. Thus, the “newness” of mental health can operate a former biopolitics

principle: the maximization of individual forces and the potentialization of life as a political

strategy of government itself and the population. In this context, in which mental health promotes

self-realization, the depression represents a typical problem case. First, due to the prominence given

to it in terms of prevalence in relation to other mental disorders. Second, not only due to expenses

from treatment and unproductivity, but also because depression includes in its symptomatology,

effectively, the subtraction of forces, low energy, fatigue, psychomotor retardation, feelings of

worthlessness, inability to plan for the future, to communicate, to concentrate, to make decisions, to

feel pleasure or interests – in short, the inability of individuals to perform to their own capabilities.

When considered epidemic, the depression is presented, therefore, as a fundamental refusal to the

biopolitics of mental health: at the same time it is an expression of an undisciplined body

(incapacitated, unpowered, slow), the depression deregulates population homeostasis (lack of

productivity, costs, suicide). Hence, the need to investigate the political function of government

conduct that underlies the current notion of mental health, and then understand the anti-normative

dimension of depression inside such a notion. In general and concluding lines, my hypothesis is that

the device of mental health is not established in isolation, but it is connected to a larger exterior; i.e,

the discourse directed to the constant need to manage, enhance and realize the capabilities of the

individual, which can be rooted in a neoliberal management of life that has the human capital – that

is, the capital-skill – as its largest source of value. �13

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Biotechnoscience in Context: Co-production of Science and the state in India!

Jawhar CT University of Hyderabad !

We are living in an age where science and technology has become an inseparable part of our life,

the interrelation between science and society demands an active academic and public debate. In the

conventional way of understanding, the relationship between science and polity remain two domain

of inquiry. This standard understanding of science considered scientific knowledge as objective,

value-free, and discovered by experts. It keeps aloof from the contextual analysis of science and

technology, so the politics and political actors have nothing to do with science and technology. In

the last three decades, many historical and sociological studies about science and technology shows

that society and culture have a great influence on the shaping of science and technology. The

theoretical and empirical studies of Science and Technology Studies (STS) shows this influence in

the context of different technologies. Understanding the interface between genetic and society is an

important access strip to understand the relationship between science and the state. This work is an

attempt to understand political sociology of biotechnoscience in the framework of Science and

Technology Studies (STS).

In this project I will address the question of co-production of knowledge and the state in 12

the context of india in general and the discourse of democracy, citizenship and governance in the

context of biotechnology in particular. It also pose question on role of scientific knowledge and

technological artefact both embeds and is embedded in social identities, institutions, representations

and discourses. The broader objective of the present project is to map the interface between science,

technology and politics in general and genetics in particular.

The introduction of GM technology in India was celebrated as a shift from green revolution

to gene revolution. The wider debate over Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs) in India started

after the Genetic Engineering Approval Committee (GEAC) under the Ministry of Environment and

Forests gave its clearance for the production and consumption of BT brinjal. BT cotton has been on

the market for some years and the anticipated release of BT brinjal, the first GM food has seen a

confrontation between government agencies and civil society groups. The civil society groups

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" According to Jasanoff, (2004) “Science, in the co-productionist framework, is understood as neither a 12simple reflection of the truth about nature nor an epiphenomenon of social and political interests. Rather, co-production is symmetrical in that it calls attention to the social dimensions of cognitive commitments and understandings, while at the same time underscoring the epistemic and material correlates of social formations” (Jasanoff: (2004) States of Knowledge: The Co-Production of Science and the Social Order).

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vehemently opposed the release of GM foods. The promoters say that Bt Brinjal will be bliss for

small farmers because it is highly insect-resistant and by increasing yields it is more economical

and very much cost-effective. It will have minimal environmental impact. On the other hand, those

who oppose BT brinjal cautions about its possible adverse impact on human health and bio-safety,

livelihoods and biodiversity.

As a response to the outcry of different stakeholders like environmental activists, scientists,

non-governmental organisations, farmers, etc, Ministry of Environment and Forest decided to

conduct public consultations across the country before taking a final decision on this issue.

Different stakeholders like farmers, scientists, agricultural experts, farmers’ organizations,

consumer groups, citizen forums, NGOs/CBOs, Government officials, media, seed suppliers,

traders, doctors, lawyers, etc. took part in the consultations and expressed their imaginaries and

concerns about the introduction of this new technology. As a result, the government of India put a

moratorium on the commercial use of GM foods. The recent debate on introduction of

Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRIA) Bill, 2013 trigged debate on the whether is

for promotion of biotech or for regulate it.

The development of biotechnology discourses trigged the political imagination of India.

This debate questioned the conventional understanding of science, state and society relation. When

genetically modified food prepared its way to the our dinning table we come across ‘everyday

democracy’ – the way we govern ourselves through the choices, commitments and connections of

daily life. The new development in the biotechnoscience evoked the question of practices in the

production, consumption and distribution of knowledge.

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Entre corpos, subjetividades e tecnologias do emagrecimento: medicalização e governamentalidade em torno da gordura

corporal!Juliana Loureiro de Oliveira

Mestranda do Programa de Pós-Graduação em Antropologia Social Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul !

Este breve resumo apresenta algumas questões que estão sendo produzidas em minha pesquisa de mestrado, que tem como tema a produção de expertise médica-científica sobre gordura e emagrecimento e a relação dessa expertise com o público leigo através de livros de aconselhamento ou de autoajuda. Além da análise desses livros, venho me dedicando ao acompanhamento e observação de blogs, notícias, grupos e páginas de Facebook voltados para dietas, emagrecimento, medicamentos inibidores de apetite e outros assuntos relativos ao peso e a gordura corporal, além do acompanhamento de publicações e páginas mantidas por pessoas ou grupos que buscam criticar o que consideram uma preocupação excessiva com tais questões. O intuito com isso é pensar as publicações e interações dos participantes dessas redes, em especial os seus relatos sobre as relações que empreendem com as tecnologias de emagrecimento – entendidas aqui tanto como discursos e prescrições médicas-científicas quanto medicamentos, cirurgias, dietas e programas alimentares, etc. Suponho que a produção dessas tecnologias de emagrecimento esteja diretamente relacionada a um processo de biomedicalização e patologização da gordura que se insere em um processo mais amplo de governo dos corpos – gordos e não gordos. Assim, tomo como referencial teórico os estudos sobre governamentalidade, biopoder e medicalização, os Estudos Sociais da Ciência e Tecnologia, estudos de gênero e estudos da gordura (Fat Studies). Tomando estes referenciais, estou interessada em compreender como foram constituídas, especialmente nas últimas décadas, uma série de instrumentos e tecnologias que se propunham a pensar e administrar legitimamente as pessoas consideradas gordas, seja individual ou coletivamente – através de diagnósticos, categorizações, grupos terapêuticos, publicações, campanhas governamentais, etc. Ao falar de instrumentos e tecnologias, adoto um sentido amplo, a fim de incluir tanto ferramentas, escalas, dispositivos de medição, etc. quanto maneiras de pensar, técnicas intelectuais, modos de autoanálise, etc. Assim, aproximando-me de autores dos ESCT e dos estudos sobre biomedicalização, entendo que não há uma separação entre os objetos e materiais concretos e o plano das ideias, de forma que esses diferentes elementos estão atuando conjuntamente na produção de diferentes modos de governo em torno da gordura corporal. A partir de Miller e Rose (2012), insiro meu projeto em um interesse mais amplo em diferentes instrumentos e processos de inscrição que ajudam a transformar determinadas questões, anseios e preocupações em problemas passíveis de serem analisados e gerenciados de diferentes formas, a partir de lugares e agentes distintos. Estes podem ser tanto peritos ou profissionais reconhecidos, quanto grupos de pressão, políticos, líderes corporativos, meios de comunicação, etc. que ajudam a dar existência a esses “problemas” que “devem ser” conhecidos e governados. Nesse sentido, há uma associação entre as racionalidades – entendidas enquanto estilos de pensamento ou modos de tornar a

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realidade pensável de determinada maneira – e as tecnologias que tornam essa realidade maleável, aberta ao cálculo e à programação. No caso do emagrecimento, acredito que uma série de experts e espaços são investidos no sentido de gerenciar as subjetividades e os corpos de indivíduos considerados gordos ou que “podem vir a ser” lidos/entendidos como gordos. Muitos desses indivíduos investem boa parte de suas vidas para adequarem-se às normas e prescrições produzidas por tais experts e espaços, mobilizando uma diversidade de elementos para garantir o seu emagrecimento. Ao observar alguns grupos online frequentados por muitos indivíduos engajados em tal processo, além de entender que o desejo de emagrecer atravessa diferentes segmentos sociais, mobilizando especialmente mulheres, percebi que, ao contrário do que eu imaginava inicialmente, a relação com as tecnologias de emagrecimento não se restringe a casos de sofrimento, frustração e angústia. Pelo contrário, os relatos que observei mostram também histórias de “vitórias” e alegrias com o “conseguir emagrecer”. A partir destes relatos, lembrei das teorizações de Donna Haraway (2009), que assume uma posição crítica em relação à retórica radicalmente contrária às tecnologias e a “tecnocultura”, como se essas fossem, exclusivamente, tecnologias de dominação e opressão. Ao falar do humano como um amontoado de “relacionalidades situadas com organismos, ferramentas e muito mais”, a autora chama atenção para as possibilidades criativas e os prazeres envolvidos nessas relações estabelecidas entre seres humanos e coisas/artefatos tecnológicos. Com isso, ela não nega as relações de poder em jogo nos processos de tecnologização e biomedicalização da vida e o próprio conceito foucaultiano de biopoder, mas assume que este conceito foi “retrabalhado, modificado, tecnologizado e instrumentalizado de diferentes modos” a partir do tecnobiocapital. O cenário analisado parece dar pistas da forte ambivalência em torno das tecnologias de emagrecimento. Utilizando as noções de biopoder e normalização dos corpos parece inegável que há uma produção e busca por adequação a um determinado padrão corporal extremamente normativo e restritivo. No entanto, me parece impossível negar que as associações com essas tecnologias envolvem também prazeres e alegrias, sensações de controle e domínio sobre o seu corpo e sua existência. Assim, minha pesquisa é atravessada pela questão sobre como realizar uma abordagem que fale tanto do inegável controle exercido pelas tecnologias de emagrecimento, quanto das demandas e escolhas de pessoas envolvidas com tais tecnologias e que querem, sim, se adequar a determinadas normas e intervir sobre seus corpos. !Referências: HARAWAY, Donna. Manifesto ciborgue: ciência, tecnologia e feminismo-socialista no final do século

XX. In: HARAWAY, Donna. HUNZRU, Hari. TADEU, Tomaz. Antropologia do ciborgue: as vertigens do pós-humano. Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2009.

MILLER, Peter. ROSE, Nikolas. Governando o presente: gerenciamento da vida econômica, social e pessoal. São Paulo: Paulus, 2012.

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A “metanarrativa inconsciente”: o caso do neodarwinismo.!Leandro Modolo Paschoalotte

Mestrando em Ciências Sociais Unesp

com apoio financeiro da FAPESP !Muitos pensadores contemporâneos já se sublevaram contra a ideia/discurso conhecido como “pós-

moderno” – como Bruno Latour (1994[1991]). Todavia, alguns pensadores respeitados se puseram a

refletir sobre as alterações iniciadas na virada da década de 1960 para 1970 e que consubstanciaram

a chamada “pós-modernidade”. David Harvey (1996), por exemplo, numa abordagem com especial

atenção aos aspectos econômicos e a políticos analisou aquilo a que chamou de “condição pós-

moderna”. F. Jameson (1997), por sua vez, deu maior atenção às transformações da lógica cultural

do capitalismo tardio, o chamado “pós-modernismo”.!

! Discorrendo criticamente sobre os autores que se agruparam em locus equidistantes do

pensamento moderno que tradicionalmente se soergueu epistêmica e ontologicamente através de

grandes narrativas – como o caso do estruturalismo, do marxismo, do positivismo etc. –, Harvey e

Jameson nos alerta: “Não é possível descartar a metateoria [e a metanarrativa]; os pós-modernistas

apenas a empurram para o subterrâneo, onde ela continua a funcionar com uma ‘efetividade agora

inconsciente’.” (JAMESON, 1996 In. HARVEY, 1996, p.112). Sendo assim, perguntamo-nos: qual

a metanarrativa que hoje funciona como uma “efetividade agora inconsciente”?!

! Não é nenhuma novidade que as Ciências Humanas, ao arriscarem explicações para o lugar

do Homem no mundo, buscam ferramentas metodológicas nas Ciências da Natureza, sobretudo nas

denominadas biociências – biologia, fisiologia, medicina etc. Aliás, a biologia social foi um dos

primeiros métodos de sistematização na compreensão das sociedades ainda no final do século

XVIII. Recentemente, o cenário editorial e científico internacional vem oferecendo estudos que

apresentam justamente essa perspectiva, ora pela biologia evolutiva, ora pelas neurociências, ora

ainda pela genética comportamental, em suma, pelas Life Sciences contemporâneas de um modo

geral.!

! Nesse sentido, atentamos para uma das investidas biocientíficas sobre as questões que

tradicionalmente, ao longo do século XX, constituíram objetos das Ciências Humanas. Nascida no

interior da própria Biologia, com o livro Sociobiology: the new synthesis (1975), de Edward O.

Wilson e The selfish gene de Richard Dawkins (1976), a Sociobiologia pode ser vista como a

primeira voz neodarwinista a falar em alto e bom som sobre os humanos. Com o objetivo

primordial de construir uma nova síntese da evolução do comportamento social dos animais –

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incluindo os humanos – tendo o gene como objeto por excelência da seleção natural, a ciência de

Wilson deu corpo, na última quadra do século XX, a uma grande narrativa capaz de imprimir

significados totalizantes na construção das acepções e representações ontológicas das ciências da

vida.!

! Exemplos desse empreendimento pode ser visualizado contemporaneamente ao menos em

três áreas relativamente distintas das ciências da vida, são elas: a própria biologia evolucionista,

donde o premiado biocientista norte-americano Jared Diamond, aparece como um de seus maiores

expoentes. A psicologia evolucionista representada pelo canadense com formação em linguística

Steven Pinker, hoje é a maior herdeira da sociobiologia. E, por último, as neurociências, “como se

baseia na biologia evolucionaria”, diz o neurocientista português Antônio R. Damásio, “situa a

consciência em um contexto histórico, adequado a organismos em transformação evolucionaria pela

seleção natural.” (DAMÁSIO, 2013, p.34). Todos esses pensadores e suas áreas afins se assentam,

cada qual ao seu modo e rigor, na grande narrativa evolucionista neodarwinista para soerguer suas

teorias e figurações universais sobre o humano.!

! Deste modo, ao se reconhecer que as biociências, sobretudo as matizadas na metanarrativa

neodarwinista, nunca deixaram de explicar holisticamente o desenvolvimento e a evolução humana.

Acreditamos na hipótese de que, na medida em que as Humanidades se tornaram “pós-

modernamente” hostis a essa modalidade de reflexão – especialmente durante a década de 70 e 80 –

elas se desarmaram e proporcionaram um terreno aberto para as metanarrativas naturalistas;

justamente no período em que o projeto neodarwinista, sobretudo aquele capitaneado pela

Sociobiologia, emergiu com força no interior das Ciências da Natureza. Donde podemos deduzir

hipoteticamente, portanto, que as metateorias/metanarrativas que passaram a funcionar como

representações inconscientes naquele período foram construídas e consolidadas pelas Ciências da

Natureza, especialmente pelas ciências da vida.

!Referencias:

DAMÁSIO, A. R. E o cérebro criou o Homem. São Paulo: Cia. das Letras, 2013.

HARVEY, D. Condição pós-moderna: uma pesquisa sobre as origens da mudança cultural. São

Paulo: Edições Loyola, 1996.

JAMESON, F. Pós-modernismo: a lógica cultural do capitalismo tardio. São Paulo: Ed. Ática, 1997

LATOUR, B. Jamais fomos modernos. Rio de Janeiro: Editora 34,1994.

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!On Their Own Terms: Dignitas and the Institutionalisation of

Assisted Suicide!Marcos Freire de Andrade Neves

PPGAS/UFRGS !!Established in 1998 by the lawyer Ludwig A. Minelli, “Dignitas – To live with dignity – To die with

dignity” is a nonprofit organization based in Forch, Switzerland, which, alongside other projects 13

and attributions, also makes it possible for its members to pursue an assisted suicide (AS). Besides

the Swiss headquarters, the organization has opened its first and so far only branch office, in

Hannover, Germany, from where it provides information to prospective new members, an also acts

as a lobbying force towards the legalization of said practice.

The organization’s activities are legally backed by a Swiss national legislation that vetoes

the assistance of a third party in a suicide attempt only when there are “selfish reasons” behind the

intent , such as the possibility of monetary gain through the requestor’s death. Thus, by fitting into 14

the category of an “uninterested” support group, due to its nonprofit nature, Dignitas may provide

its services to those who fulfill at least one of three main criteria, regardless of nationality. The

requestor must: (1) have been diagnosed with a disease that lies outside therapeutic possibilities –

the so-called terminal illnesses –; (2) to suffer from an incapacitating physical condition; or (3) to

be in unbearable pain. Only these medical diagnoses authorize the recourse to assisted suicide,

which, ultimately, guarantees the requestor’s right to end his or her life – an option that is not

available otherwise. Committed to this idea and actively promoting it in debates that stretch beyond

Swiss borders, the organization proposes the availably of access to AS to all of those in full

possession of their mental faculties, thus disconnecting it from medical diagnoses that confirm a

chronic or terminal illness.

The main objective is to analyze the so called “provisional green light”. This dispositive

indicates a provisional authorization to carrying out an AS that will only effectively take place after

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" “Dignitas – Menschenwürdig leben – Menschenwürdig sterben”, in the original German.13

" According to Article 115 of the Swiss Criminal Code (StGB), “Those who, by selfish reasons, either 14facilitate or help somebody’s attempt at suicide, and in case such suicide or its attempt takes place, shall be convicted with a sentence of no more than 5 years in prison or due to pay a fine”. Therefore, the practice of assisted suicide (AS) is backed by a legal interpretation that exempts a nonprofit organization from any “selfish reasons”. In order to assure this, however, several bureaucratic and procedural stages must be observed before the AS takes place.

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a series of medical and bureaucratic stages. Upon starting the procedures that would eventually lead

to the AS, the member should not only provide recent medical evaluations proving his or her current

health condition, but also go through two physical and psychiatric consultations as a way of

establishing the lack of external pressures of any kind – thus fulfilling the “selfish reasons” clause,

such as the pressure a relative might exert in order to obtain certain financial advantages through

the deceased’s heirloom. If, on the one hand, the many stages aim at ensuring that the member’s

decision is not influenced by external pressures and that he or she fulfills the previously mentioned

criteria, on the other they impose a prolonged temporality between the first contact and the assisted

suicide per se that implies the absence of a decision-making impulse. This factor denotes a non-

impulsive suicide, meticulously, bureaucratically and financially planned, distancing it from the

classic notions revolving on the act itself.

Moreover, the “provisional green light” is configured as a life-validating mechanism

separating those lives that deserve to be lived from those that may be ended. A sorting mechanism

that determines which lives the State, through Dignitas and through the establishing of legal and

medical criteria, allows to be extinct, a logic that raises a series of questions regarding the

ownership of body and life, the conception of a self-determining individual, subject of his or her

own decisions. These questions are found in the intersection of medical, political, religious and

moral arguments – many of which were discussed at ESPCA/SPSAS. For most of the members, to

merely receive the “provisional green light” is the end goal, and not the carrying out of the assisted

suicide per se. According to data provided by the organization, 70% of the members who have been

given the green light have never again been in touch with Dignitas, and only 13% went through

with the AS.

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From Depression to Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD): Notes on Ritalin Promotion and Advertisement!

Miguel Hexel Herrera MSc in Social Anthropology

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul com apoio financiero do CNPq !

This ongoing thesis examines the promotion and advertisement for Ritalin (a trade name for

methylphenidate) from a science and technology studies (STS) perspective. Ritalin is a

psychostimulant medication used for the treatment of attention deficit hyperactivity

disorder (ADHD). ADHD is one of the most common childhood disorders and can continue through

adolescence and adulthood. Symptoms include

hyperactivity, difficulty staying focused, paying attention

and difficulty controlling behavior. The worldwide

prevalence estimates of attention deficit hyperactivity

disorder (ADHD) are highly variable. Literature reviews

have reported rates ranging from as low as 1% to as high

as 20% among school-age children (Rohde et al. 2011).

Between 2002 and 2006, the Brazilian production of

methylphenidate raised 465 per cent (Itaborahy, Ortega,

2013) and between 2004 and 2013, the consumption raised

775 per cent (Barros, 2014). The epidemiological data

shows that there was a considerable increase in

methylphenidate usage and expansion of its use by healthy

individuals to enhance cognitive functions, especially in

within academic circles. As observed by anthropologist

Fabíola Rohden, one way to understand this complex phenomenon is to shed light on the “(…)

interaction of the multiple actors in the scene, such as researchers, clinicians, the pharmaceutical

industry, the media and consumers and the intense interplay of interests and outlook of the world

involved in the discourse that is being produced. (p. 622, 2013). Aspects such as scientific

legitimacy, economic and political interests, professional conflicts and gender relations encompass

an intricate game of tensions that give rise to unanticipated outcomes. (Rohden, p.622, 2013)

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Figure 1. Psychosomatic Medicine, Vol.18, No.2, 1956.

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The current study aims to examine how Ritalin, originally promoted by Ciba as a mild

antidepressant, became the drug of first choice to treat

ADHD (known at the time as hyperactivity or minimal

brain dysfunction). This dissertation examines the

development of methylphenidate treatment and the

expansion of the diagnostic category of ADHD through

the analysis of pharmaceutical advertisements for Ritalin

in UK, US and Canadian medical journals published

between 1956 and 2000’s. Most of the journals were

retrieved from Portal de Períodicos da Capes and 15

MEDLINE searches. I selected a sample of 54 ritalin

advertisements to analyze, based mainly on image

quality. These pharmaceutical advertisements show that

this psychotropic was originally marketed for depression

and mood disorders, fatigue, lethargy and narcolepsy. By

the end of the 60´s, Ritalin is being shown – and

renowned – as an effective treatment for “hyperactive

children”. Ilina Singh (2007) suggests that when we consider pharmaceutical advertisement

material as a legitimate documental source, it is possible contributing to retrieve historical aspects

of a specific drug, which might otherwise go unnoticed, since this type of material is characterized

as an essential component in the persuasive arsenal of those companies. !References: !BARROS, Denise. As representações sociais do uso do metilfenidato: do tratamento ao aprimoramento

cognitivo. Tese (Doutorado em Saúde Coletiva). Instituto de Medicina Social, Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, 2014.

ITABORAHY, Claudia; ORTEGA, Fernando. O metilfenidato no Brasil: uma década de publicações. Ciênc. saúde coletiva, Rio de Janeiro, v. 18, n. 3, Mar. 2013.

ROHDE, Luis, Augusto; et al. Transtorno de déficit de atenção/hiperatividade. Revist Bras. Psiquiatr. São Paulo, v. 22, supl. 2. 2000.

ROHDE, L. A., et al. The Worldwide Prevalence of ADHD: A Systematic Review and Metaregression Analysis. American Journal of Psychiatry 164(6):942-948. 2011.

ROHDEN, Fabíola. Gender differences and the medicalization of sexuality in the creation of sexual dysfunctions diagnosis. CLAM. Sexuality, Culture and Politics - A South American Reader. 2013. Disponível em: clam.org.br/uploads/publicacoes/book2/35.pdf

SINGH, Ilina. Bad boys, good mothers and the 'miracle' of Ritalin. Science in Context, 15(4), 577-603. 2002. ___________. Not just naughty: 50 years of stimulant drug advertising. Medicating Modern America (eds.

A. Toon & E. Watkins), NYU Press, 131-155. 2007.

�23" www.periodicos.capes.gov.br15

Figure 2. Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, Vol. 44, No.1, 1958.

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Os Desdobramentos Éticos do Tecnicismo Moderno: Um Diálogo Crítico entre Hans Jonas e Martin Heidegger!

Roberta Soares Nazário da Silva Aluna do Programa de Pós-Graduação de Filosofia

UFPE com apoio financeiro da CAPES/PROCAD !

A curiosidade dos cientistas/pesquisadores os levaram a realizar descobertas imprescindíveis para a

vida moderna (motor a combustão, computadores, máquina de raio X, satélites, celulares, vacinas,

aeronaves etc.). No entanto, muitos destes inventos nem sempre foram usados de uma maneira

adequada, trazendo grandes prejuízos para o homem e o meio ambiente. E para que não o crivo,

sobre o que deve ou não ser pesquisado e comercializado seja imparcial, outras áreas do

conhecimento se detiveram igualmente a analisar o problema. Logo, a tarefa de criticar os modelos

científicos também se tornou papel dos cientistas sociais, educadores, historiadores e antropólogos.

Ao cientista estrito, aquele das ciências duras, não pertence unicamente mais o fato de pensar sobre

o tipo de prática que realiza.

Por conseguinte, este tema passou a pertencer também à esfera da filosofia, e ela se deteve a

analisar as diversas mudanças que ocorreram em um curto período de tempo, dentro do processo

histórico da civilização. Deste modo, todo esse avanço tecnológico gerado através de uma pretensão

científica sem parâmetros, cujas produções em sua grande maioria são desconhecidas dos

consumidores finais, criou um cenário em que se torna categórico pensar o problema gerado pelo

impacto da técnica moderna. E, como dito anteriormente, devido essas alterações acontecerem

dentro do processo histórico, em um intervalo muito curto de tempo, só mostra a necessidade de

uma análise filosófica acerca desses dois determinantes que fazem parte da vida do homem

moderno: a ciência e a técnica moderna.

Portanto, a ideia principal deste trabalho está centrada na tentativa de analisar o fenômeno

da técnica moderna e seus desdobramentos, contrapondo dois dos autores contemporâneos da

técnica de maior relevância: Martin Heidegger e Hans Jonas. É quase improvável que grande parte

das pesquisas nesta área, quando estudadas ou examinadas, não contenham conceitos ou, que se não

se encontrem, categoricamente, a posição filosófica do alemão Martin Heidegger. Do mesmo modo,

quando se pondere sobre questões ecológicas emergenciais, da determinação de um juízo de valor

sobre o agir do homem na natureza, ou mesmo sobre uma ética mais condizente para o

comportamento da modernidade não se discorra sobre o filósofo Hans Jonas.

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Martin Heidegger se destaca na análise deste fenômeno, pela abordagem em sua obra “A

Questão da Técnica” de 1953 ou, pelo menos é nela, que mais expressamente o pensador retrata o

problema da técnica. Hans Jonas, por sua vez, tem em “O Princípio Responsabilidade” publicado

em 1979, seu principal livro, uma maneira diferencial de analisar o fenômeno da técnica moderna,

ao pretender a atualização das éticas filosóficas para a sociedade contemporânea. Um dos pontos

em que ambos pensadores concordam, é de que a técnica moderna muito se distancia daquela dos

tempos remotos, e é justamente essa mudança que deve ser melhor examinada, pois o que se

encontra circunscrito, nessa alteração, é a própria mudança do homem.

Essa ameaça que a técnica moderna configura, como dito antes, é tema de pesquisa em

variadas áreas do conhecimento humano. Desde os estudos mais diretivos como, por exemplo,

sobre os impactos gerados pelos agrotóxicos no solo e na saúde humana, os poluentes e a camada

de ozônio ou sobre o melhor uso dos recursos naturais não renováveis, que se examinam meios

práticos para que o homem se relacione de uma maneira menos agressiva com a natureza. E esses

estudos só comprovam que o agir humano tem um poder imprevisível e de grande alcance.

Em suma, a pesquisa tem por intenção suscitar uma maior ponderação sobre a questão da

técnica moderna. Mesmo que se tenha a noção de que, contemporaneamente, esse tema é mais

discutido dentro das mais variadas áreas acadêmicas, talvez pelo grau de relação que tem que o

homem moderno, ela necessite ser melhor e mais refletida. Entre as questões em que os dois autores

concordam, está o fato de que a técnica possui o caráter de ser ambígua. Já que fenômeno tem por

característica ser ambivalente (benéfico e maléfico), não se pode tomá-lo como neutral, o perigo

decorre do desconhecimento dessa relação. E, por ter o seu aspecto positivo indissociável do

negativo, demanda que se faça uma análise mais pertinente e criteriosa.

Prontamente, tomando por base estes trabalhos realizados em torno desta temática, a

relevância de traçar um comparativo sobre a disposição da interpretação crítica do Heidegger e a

proposta ética do filósofo Hans Jonas, que aborda uma posição de responsabilidade, se dá

exatamente por trabalharem o tema de forma bastante característica. E, através de indagações

adquiridas destas leituras, as visões dos autores podem corroborar para uma indicação de uma nova

postura diante dessa realidade.

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Project: Family, Health and Activism in the Age of Genomics!Waleska Aureliano

PhD in Social Anthropology State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) !

My post-doctoral research project has as main objective to investigate the trajectories of families

affected by rare and hereditary degenerative diseases in Brazil. The purpose is to analyze how, within

local perceptions of health disorders of genetic origin, notions of family and kinship, reproduction

and health, risk and responsibility operated, and which obstacles, difficulties and dilemmas these

families faced in the pursuit of diagnosis, treatment and social insertion.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), an illness is considered rare when it affects

fewer than sixty-five in one hundred thousand people. Despite the lack of consensus as to the exact

number, it is believed that between five and eight thousand rare diseases exist in the world today, of

which eighty per center are genetic, and affect eight per center of the world population. In Brazil it is

estimated that 15,000,000 people suffer from rare diseases, of which a considerable part have neither

cure nor treatment, show severe morbidity and incapacitating disability, and, in some cases, lead to

premature death.

As research progressed, I made contact with an association of patients affected by ataxia in

Rio de Janeiro. Ataxia is a rare form of degenerative disease that affects speech and movement,

causes progressive paralysis of the body and for which there is no cure or treatment. From this contact

with the association I also became interested in the ways that families affected by rare diseases are

politically organized in Brazil, in search for treatment and health care, and how in this process they

building relationships with biomedical, scientific, and legal systems, as well as with the State.

Three questions have become relevant during my fieldwork and make me think about the

meanings and uses that genetic technologies acquire for these families:

1. The manner in which illness experience was conceptualized in the family before they know its

genetic and hereditary factors: Contact with two extensive families has revealed that perception

of the disease is not always understood as hereditary. For members of one of the families, with

relatives spread around the country, the symptoms of Machado Joseph disease were similar to

diseases common in old age, such as arthritis or rheumatism. References to grandparents, great

aunts and uncles, or even parents who died at an advanced age, led to the idea that family

members would suffer more as they getting older, eventually becoming paralytic. For other

family, the proximity of various relatives affected by the same symptoms led them to believe that

there was a health problem in the family; however, they did not see the causes of symptoms as

genetic.

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2. The manner in which the knowledge about genetics causes of family’s disease affected their

perception of health and reproduction, considering the notion of risk present in medical

explanations: For both families, the knowledge of the disease’s genetic and hereditary origins

came after a family member was formally diagnosed, after seek for treatment to imbalance. This

information, however, did not lead other family members, especially those without symptoms, to

undergo predictive testing or genetic counseling. For those who developed symptoms, testing

became an important way to legitimize absence from work and facilitate the retirement process.

Regarding the risk of inheriting or transmitting the Machado Joseph gene, asymptomatic

members of the two families, affirmed that they did not want to know their condition by

predictive tests, due to the absence of healing treatment for the disease. Nonetheless, they

acknowledged the risk and take certain actions based on the possibility of coming down with the

disease, such as seeking financial autonomy through stable employment offering a health

insurance plan.

3. In which way the fear of the disease is managed, and the way hope appears in this process: So,

fear of the disease is managed in ways other than predictive testing, which some researches have

shown to be rarely sought by asymptomatic members of families with rare diseases. This does not

mean that these people were not concerned about the risk of coming down with a rare disease;

instead, it is indicative of other manners of problematizing the risk and of managing it through

life choices, like the aforementioned employment and family planning strategies. The hope that a

cure will be found in the near future was also present. Although this hope sometimes indicated a

religious faith, as is the case with some members of the families researched, it was always that

scientific research would discover a cure, not that a miracle would take place. On the other hand,

hope gives birth to a moral project, capable of making a life possible not only in the future, but

right now in the present.

Finally, up to this point, I have been concerned about the variability and diversity of perceptions and

forms of engagement possible to these families members, based on the knowledge about their genetic

disease. This led me to rethink the concepts of biosociality and bioidentities (RABINOW, 1999;

ROSE, 2013), and including the need to take into account certain markers of social difference, such

as class, age, gender and race, in the analyses of people living with rare diseases.

!References:

RABINOW, Paul. “Artificialidade e Iluminismo: da sociobiologia à biossociabilidade”. IN: RABINOW, P. Antropologia da Razão. Rio de Janeiro. Relumé Dumara, 1999.

ROSE, Nikolas. A política da própria vida: biomedicina, poder e subjetividade no século XXI. São Paulo: Paulus, 2013.

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School-Oriented Think Pieces!!!

ESPCA and the Future!Amelia Hassoun

MSc Digital Anthropology University College London !

ESPCA was full of activist-researchers, invested not only in rigorous scholarship but also in

bringing a better future into being. In fact, the school as a whole was fascinatingly future-oriented,

with many examining how the future is imagined and maintained through biological and medical

technologies. I found it extremely refreshing how far away the ivory tower felt from these engaged,

concerned discussions of the very real implications of technologically-fuelled imaginaries for both

scientists and non-scientists.

Stephen Hilgartner suggested that we take seriously claims of revolutionary

biotechnological change, in order to examine how the unimaginable becomes imaginable. He

encouraged us to ask: How do these imagined worlds relate to self-understandings of societies?

How do you study governance of the emerging and the emergence of governance at the same time?

From an STS perspective this line of inquiry is especially interesting, motivated as STS has recently

been to evaluate how non-scientists shape the ground upon which scientific discovery and discourse

take place. Knowledge and the social order take shape together. Visions of the future are

conditioned significantly by existing institutional logics and history. Perhaps most importantly,

imaginaries are regulatory mechanisms that imagine a status quo that has power and acts.

In a similar vein, Marko Monteiro stressed that sociotechnical imaginaries are

fundamentally material practices, with material effects on power. He asked how we can analyze

disease research as it co-constructs bodies, technologies, policies, and products related to science

and health. Despite, for example, the consensus in population genetics that biological race is non-

existent, race continues to be a central concept in disease research, policy, and practice.

A fundamental characteristic of the future is uncertainty. As Sahra Gibbon argued through

her work on breast cancer genomics, patients must cope with information of uncertain clinical

significance arising from uncertain technologies. These predictive technologies evoke futures and

mandate choices in the present based upon uncertain futures, driven by clinical invocations of risk.

Jane Calvert, too, pointed out how futures can have real effects on the present, through a

discussion of how systems biologists attempt to make biology more predictable, life more

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calculable. Vitally, she stressed the lack of a dichotomy between science and society: how “dirty,

unruly” living systems, as one of her informants put it, are always present and usually somewhat

unpredictable. She highlighted the tension in the life sciences between uncertainty and ambiguity on

one hand and transformative potential on the other. The more time goes on, the more predictable the

trajectory of a technology becomes, but the less power we have to control it. We must, she argued,

increase the diversity of voices that can contribute to a discussion of futures being built by the life

sciences. Through, for example, speculative design combining art and science, we can open up and

create contestable futures rather than subscribing to a false, inevitable teleology.

Hilgartner and Rapp proved to be extremely interesting bookends. Rayna Rapp concluded

with an imperative to challenge notions of medical progress, slowing medicalization and

introducing complexity into systems. She asked: what could predictive genetic technologies

potentially do to populations with “abnormal” (non-normative) genetic conditions resulting from

mutations? We are caught in a double telos, whereby cultural values of perfection and early

intervention (and resulting eugenic impulses) clash with acceptance of all kinds of heterogeneity of

groups in a “differentially fragmented” society. There is no doubt that biological and social forces

are inseparably entangled. Technologies have social lives. Local and international media as well as

national traditions and narratives, as Addi Bharadwaj pointed out, shape the form that regulation

takes. The old, always and inevitably, dictates the forms of the new.

I was inspired, as well, by many of the student presentations addressing similar issues and

encouraging us to diversify imaginations of the future and ideas of progress. In short, I hope that the

work done by the individuals at ESPCA on how new medical and biological technologies shape and

are shaped by imaginaries of the future in very material ways can affect scholarship in other fields,

prompting the same kinds of scrutiny of all promissory technological fantasies.

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!!

The Public Intellectual – A short reflection on the role of the STS scholar!

Christiaan de Koning Maastricht University !!

‘Biotechnology, Biosocialities, and the Governance of the Life Sciences’ were the central themes

during the five-day summer school that took place at the State University of Campinas, Brazil.

Around 100 Students and scholars from a wide range of universities and countries attended to

discuss STS (Science, Technology and Society Studies) and biotechnology. I would like to add one

central theme that I experienced to be implicitly present throughout this gathering: reflection on the

role of the future STS scholar.

My own research is about the governance of Genetically Modified Insects (GMIs) . This 16

fitted squarely with one of the cornerstones during the summer school: the governance of the life

sciences in a globalized context. For instance, this issue was addressed in Phil Macnaghten’s

(Unicamp/Durham University) lecture on GM crops and that of Aditya Bharadwaj (The Graduate

Institute, Switzerland) on stem cell research.

One of my study’s findings is that GMIs raise concerns as the biotechnology challenges and

transcends the categorisations and orderings on which the common principles of governance and

public policy are based. Different geopolitical understandings of GMI projects can be observed in

each setting of deployment, resulting in different responses. These differences in understanding can

lead to tensions. Interestingly, the tensions I observed exist between the different approaches used in

the North (Europe) and South (Latin America). It is this tension between different societies using

different public reasoning that sparked my curiosity: could such a division between North and 17

South exist as well within the global STS community? Traveling from the Netherlands to the

summer school in Brazil it was not division that I found, but co-creation.

Rayna Rapp (New York University) stressed during her thought-provoking lecture that the

new generation of (STS) researchers – a profile that fitted the majority of her audience – should ask

themselves where they will stand in the future. How to find ways to be academically, politically,

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" The purpose of the Genetically Modified Insect (GMI) biotechnology is to suppress insect populations 16that are agricultural pests or that spread diseases harmful to human beings.

" This is in reference to what Sheila Jasanoff named ‘Civic Epistemologies’ (Jasanoff, 2011).17

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and socially relevant? As an early career researcher (but a lifelong student) and inspired by her

lecture, I started wondering about the role of the STS scholar. As much as the field of STS is about

co-creation between technoscientific and social aspects, I figured that it is also about the co-creation

between the young STS scholar and the established one; between STS scholars and biotechnical

engineers; between activism and academia; between arts and science; between North and South; or

even between today and tomorrow. I should not, however, formulate this issue in such a

dichotomous form: either continuity or discontinuity would be a better fit.

How I see the future role of the STS scholar comes close to what Wiebe Bijker refers to as

the public intellectual (2003). This new ideal-typical intellectual follows a pragmatic philosophy,

draws on STS, and focuses on concrete problems as a starting point instead of universal values and

differences. This would mean a broadening of the STS agenda to be able to address the wide range

of current societal problems and an increasingly more prominent role for the STS scholar in society.

Having brought together such an international, young, and vibrant group of STS scholars, I

believe that the gathering of the ESPCA summer school also has symbolic value: continuation of

the STS practise and the rise of a young community of public intellectuals.

!I am grateful to the organisers, FAPESP, and UCL for their generous funding and support in making

this experience possible.

!!References:

Bijker, W. E. (2003). The Need for Public Intellectuals: A Space for STS Pre-Presidential Address,

Annual Meeting 2001, Cambridge, MA. Science, Technology & Human Values, 28(4),

443-450.

Jasanoff, S. (2011). Designs on nature: science and democracy in Europe and the United States.

Princeton University Press.

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Connecting the dots: field mapping, network and community building !

Gabriela Bortz Institute for Science and Technology Studies

Universidad Nacional de Quilmes (IESCT-UNQ) CONICET, Argentina

A week went by where a set of disconnected –or

mildly connected- particles were being entangled

together by strange energetic bonds, or even chemical

downloads that made some new electric cellular

connections. Going back to an old Science,

Technology and Society debate, one may think of a

network planner, given the particles’ gathering was no

accident indeed, or a self-organized process, where

heterogeneous elements got aligned in heterogeneous ways in a fledgling –but up and coming-

socio-technical network. Considering the empirical base gathered through that one week, one might

say it was probably a little bit of both. And what circulated among this energetic field were humans,

worldwide research institutions, artifacts, knowledge, techniques, biological material, huge science

labs, funding, plane tickets, interactive learning, disciplinary frames, S&T policies, sociotechnical

imaginaries, coffee and caipirinhas.

Would have been our own research subject-objects at the time, we would have seen how the

Sao Paulo School of Advanced Sciences 2014 “Biotechnology, Biosocialities, and the Governance

of the Life Sciences” was a delight in itself for any STS scholar around: the privilege of studying a

truly ‘in the making’ process of network building and the emergence of a worldwide community,

getting more dense after each presentation and coffee break, and that got reinforced as well in a

parallel virtual tier by networking and media covering in an endless flow of #ESPCA2014 tweets.

But, to increase the delight of that inner S&T anthropologist that inhabits within each of us, that

week involved not merely a human / institutional dot connection within over 100 young scholars –

and nearly 20 highly renowned professors- from all around the world, but also the assembling of a

whole set of research topics and material entities that draw together a complex biosocialities map:

reproductive technologies, stem cells, GMOs and pesticides, public health, sanitary interventions,

cancer research and medical care, smoking habits, genetics and the Genome Project, synthetic

biology, art, gender issues, immigration and diasporas, tissue economies, biohacking, clinical trials,

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sociotechnical imaginaries, open science, disabilities, body control technologies and eugenics,

bioethics, regulation and unions, indigenous knowledge and knowledge negotiation, Science and

Technology policies, R&D agendas, persistent inequalities and social activism.

And now what? How to multiply the connections between the dots? And how can we make

these bonds thicker? And what for?

During the ESPCA 2014 what we have attended and discussed is a whole range of pressing

– past, present and near future- problems that need to be addressed: from infectious diseases to

neurologic diseases and cancer; and the need to provide new research and treatment responses, from

land grabbing, concentration and multinational seed companies, to the need to dynamize local safe

food production that can deliver food for all; from new forms of labor and risks and the need to

provide protection for workers; from infertility, to the need to make available reproductive

treatments; from new forms of bio-economic trades and exchanges, and the need to regulate on

emerging legal voids; from neglected diseases and disabilities, and the need for the ‘patients’ to get

‘active’ and empowered, striving for R&D and public health responses in the public sphere; and the

list goes on. And we have also came across a whole range of technological solutions: artifacts,

processes –such as new biotechnological processes and techniques, preservation of indigenous

knowledge, or even new ways of producing knowledge from a grassroots perspective, such as

hacking or open science-, or organizations – such as healthcare systems, regulations-, and that let

us think of new sociotechnical presents and futures.

As Bijker (1995:6) would say: “I have come to believe that an integration of case studies,

theoretical generalizations and political analysis is called for and possible, both to understand the

relations between technology and society and to act on issues of socio-technical change”. This

intense thought provoking and intellectually invigorating summer/winter (there was some

interpretative flexibility on the matter) school has seeded a whole new set of connections and

networks, and a whole –not new- but pressing set of global and local issues, relevant both for North

and South, that need to be addressed. From these plural knowledge framings put in dialog in a

community of practice, the challenge ahead is to find ways to go beyond the academic discussion

towards socially relevant research-action: questioning the directions of technological development,

integrating developing knowledge into social and environmental problems, engaging in further

policy and social movements’ interaction, and embracing its governance towards more egalitarian

sociotechnical futures.

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Whose Dreams Are These? The Importance of Governing Beyond Risk!Lisa Cockburn Affiliation goes here !

Below I offer a few of the most salient points and lessons I took from the São Paulo School of

Advanced Sciences on Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the Governance of the Life Sciences. A key

thread throughout the week was the need to govern beyond risk. This means asking questions about

the types of research we as a society want to invest our limited resources in. For example, Jane

Calvert stressed the importance of upstream engagement and anticipatory governance that involves

the publics in all stages, not simply outreach to gain acceptance of predetermined paths. Stephen

Hilgartner set the tone well when he asked, how do "unimaginable" technologies become imaginable?

To approach this question he offered a comparison of what he termed “vanguard visions” often

brought forth by elite collectives who have access to money, power, social capital, knowledge, and

what Jasanoff and Kim have described as sociotechnical imaginaries http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/

research/platforms/imaginaries/). Sociotechnical imaginaries are national, durable, and develop over

time, while vanguard visions may be fleeting. As Jane put it, technological visions smuggle in values.

During Susanne Lettow’s thorough overview of bioeconomies, biopolitics and gender, I was

reminded of the value of activating a feminist methodology, even when dealing with topics not

explicitly gender-related. A feminist methodological approach pays attention not only to what people

say but what their practices are, looking for the underlying desires and perceived needs that drive

their actions, and paying attention to the contested nature of needs and desires, power relations, and

individual and contested modes of resistance. Attention to desires and perceived needs can help to

avoid falling into patriarchal modes of judgment of right and wrong, which I think is especially

important when dealing with uncertain futures and speculative visions. While we should not ignore

the risks, we also need to remain open to the futures these technologies seem to be offering, all the

while asking, who benefits from these dreams, and under what conditions? The incorporation of

design questions and creative work is also key in this regard, as exemplified by the remarkable art-

science collaboration in which Jane Calvert was a participant, Synthetic Aesthetics (http://

www.syntheticaesthetics.org).

Although we may aim to govern beyond risks, the risks themselves must also be confronted.

Highlighting the challenges of regulating emerging technologies, Noela Invernizzi of the Latin

American Nanotechnology and Society Network (www.relans.org) provided an illuminating and

thought-provoking take on the interface of nanotechnology, labour unions and workers’ rights. As the

first reports of dangers of working with these particles in an intimate and loosely controlled manner

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emerge, (such as this report of a chemist working with nickel nanoparticles http://

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ajim.22344/abstract), risks remain underreported. It seems clear

that specific regulation is needed for nanotech, not just an extension of chemical regulations, as the

surface effects (increased reactivity) that emerge at the nano-scale form the basis for both their

innovative potential and their potential risks. It was disturbing to hear that although Europe and

Australia are deeply involved in regulatory discussion, the USA and Canada have undertaken almost

no regulatory activity; even more so, since the above-mentioned case occurred in Canada. Noela

discussed how the increasing scientification of regulation works to undermine lay knowledge that

workers gain from first hand experience with these new technologies. She highlighted the necessity of

attending to the “undone science” that those with the power to fund research may overlook. The

concept of “undone science” was first articulated by David Hess, and later elaborated as “systematic

nonproduction of knowledge in the institutional matrix of state, industry, and social movements” by

Frickel et al (2010) (http://sth.sagepub.com/content/35/4/444.short). This research on dangers and

long-term effects may not be the most glamorous or lucrative, but it is necessary if we are going to

make informed decisions as a society on how to proceed, not only with nanotechnology, but with

biological engineering, synthetic biology, and other emerging technologies.

The last point I will make moves from theory to academic practice: a reminder of the

incredible value of colleagues. Academic work can be overwhelmingly isolating. The opportunity to

share fragmented and unfinished ideas can be one of the most valuable aspects of both summer

schools and conferences. But at all of these events, it is inevitably during the informal, social times

that the most useful interactions occur. Although this held true, what made this experience exceptional

for me was that some of my most generative thinking about my own work happened while

participating in a small group discussion about other students projects. This summer school was the

most disciplinarily-focused event I have participated in to date. For the first time, rather than feeling

like an outsider among historians or anthropologists or sociologists, I was actually surrounded by

people working in STS, which was heartening. Two afternoons had been set aside for smaller groups

to discuss student work, and our breakout group decided to rebel against the empty oppression of the

air conditioned buildings and move outside. As we sat in the golden glow of late afternoon sun

surrounded by exotically shaped Brazilian seedpods, we chatted with sociologist of science Phil

MacNaghten about GMO regulation, interface-blurring cyborg technologies, and how to formulate

meaningful questions about science and society. Although on the second day we moved back inside

and engaged in a more formal presentation format, I left that first session feeling more invigorated,

inspired, and clear-sighted than I had for quite some time. Sometimes, even academics need to dream

together.

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!ESPCA: Reflections on Power and Politics!

Melissa Creary Doctoral Candidate at The Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts

Emory University !!The Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada em Biotecnologia, Biossociabilidade e Governaça em

Ciências da Vida (Sao Paulo School of Advanced Science in Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the

Governance of the Life Sciences) brought scholars from across the globe to discuss technologies of

body and earth, imaginaries, and identities. I explore how the biology, social determinants, and

policy for sickle cell disease are framed in Brazil. Examining various levels, from the individual to

the governmental, I pay particular attention to cultural and historical ideas about race, health, and

identity. The collectivities that I study share a personal investment in their biology. But how does

the concept work when seemingly static notions of biology are situated with a culturally fluid

framework of race? How does the State aid and abet these collectivities in the provision of hope?

How do authenticity, legitimacy, and power work together to the advantage or detriment of my

study population? The reflections below attempt to highlight aspects of the weeklong experience

that helped me frame my work.

The concept of power inherently embeds itself into conversations about identity, legitimacy,

and status. This was a highly acknowledged topic throughout the week. Stephen Hilgartner framed

biosociality as a process enacted through classification, power, discipline, and hierarchy. Theories

of legitimacy of power, as explained by Korostelina (2014), have described legitimacy as

acceptance of the system of power as “right” by both advantaged and disadvantaged groups.

Members of low-status groups are in conflict with the system and must manage their

incompatibility within the system. The social reconfigurations that emerge around sickle cell

disease are an example of biosociality. Biological citizens are thusly produced who share this

diagnosis and make claims to the state. This is a strategy enlisted by those within systems of power

who use their identities (racial, molecular-genetic, national, ancestral, etc.) to gain access to higher

rungs of status. Often because there is so much riding on this ascent for recognition, those who are

most marginalized engage in “political economies of hope,” (Good, 1990). Aditya Bharadwaj

highlighted these concepts in his discussion on the production of biotechnologies and its

implications for society. His reference to nomadic identities and the therapeutic citizens presented

ways of thinking how my narrators may navigate large hegemonic forces. I was inspired to think

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about how the notion of “engines of medicalization” as discussed by Kenneth Camargo, plays itself

out in my project. In the case of the creation of sickle cell policies from the Brazilian Ministry of

Health, the engines are vast and include geo-political trends, public health infrastructure,

democratization, and the many actors who may serve more as coal than the engine itself. The

(perceived) quality of this coal has the power to seize the engine in its entirety.

I was also drawn to how these collective identities produce “lives as political acts,” phrased

by Herbert Daniel, an AIDS activist from Brazil, and research participant of speaker, Carlos

Guiherme do Valle. This idea continues to resonate with me and was at the forefront of my mind

when Rayna Rapp closed our weeklong program with her reflections on science, technology, and

social activism. The Brazilian biological citizens, who have sickle cell disease have organized

themselves into biosocial groups, have become important stakeholders who interact on every level

with the development and implementation of policy. Many of them have also transformed their

lives based on a personal diagnosis or that of a family member. I was pushed by Rapp’s

presentation to look for how activism is performed in discursive ways as well. Active and passive

performance will help tell the stories of narrators who form their identities around particular sites of

knowledge and power in my work. The potential novelty of racial consciousness delivered with the

diagnosis of sickle cell disease for some, may affect how the new biological citizen interacts with

new knowledge (of both disease and race) and opposing power.

For both the individual and the collective, the relationship between somatic knowledge and

biocitizenship claims is an evolving and complicated one. The nuanced lectures organized by the

State University of Campinas, UNICAMP, provided a rich platform that emphasized the need for

work that continues to question how biopolitical strategies are utilized in these claim-making

practices.

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Socially Engaged STS and the Value of North-South Collaborations!

Roberto Toledo INSHEA !

Here, in addition to sharing a little more about my research, I would like to reiterate my gratitude to

the organizers and participants at the São Paulo Advanced School on Biotechnologies, Biosocialities

and the Governance of the Life Sciences for the priceless experience. The school was especially

important for my long-term of goal of building relationships with Brazilian researchers addressing

scientific and ethical debates around medicalization and social exclusion.

The year preceding the event, I participated in a trilingual (Portuguese, Spanish, French)

conference in São Paulo on medicalization where researchers insisted on the importance of building

scientific alternatives to standard approaches in public health instead of simply critically ethically

problematic practices and discourse.

At the school, I was very excited to meet Brazilian and Latin American researchers with more

social engagement and greater post-colonial sensibility than is typically reflected in STS departments.

I will never forget the conversation I had at Casa São Jorge with Lea Velho and Renato Dagnino

about leftist STS approaches and Orlando Fals Borda and Paulo Freire as STS researchers avant la

lettre.

In terms of my research on medicalization, my exchanges with Kenneth Camargo and Sandra

Caponi were precious. I was especially honored to accept Ken’s invitation to visit the Instituto de

Medicina Social in Rio following the event. This pluridisciplinary institute, where Michel Foucault

was once an invited speaker, has a long history of critical and creative research on public health. I

was once again confirmed in my informed belief that Brazil is an “obligatory passage point” for my

long-term research projects.

Finally, I greatly enjoyed meeting and discussing with socially engaged non-Brazilian

professors who have been conducting research in Brazil and collaborating with Brazilian researchers,

such as Sahra Gibbon and Phil Macnaghten. I hope that the school will motivate more non-Brazilians

to learn Portuguese and to develop sustained collaborations. To conclude, I would like to share the

poster on my STS research that I put together for 2013 Medicalization conference in São Paulo where

I began developing such collaborations in the specific areas of my research. For those who would like

a description of my research in English, they can also refer to my short piece on the Cultural

Anthropology website: http://www.culanth.org/fieldsights/347-invisibilities-deviation-visibilizing-

the-invisible-operation-of-racism-in-french-psychosocial-institutions

Até a próxima!

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!São Paulo Advanced School on Biotechnology, Biosocialities and the Governance of the Life Sciences, August 11th - 15th!

Rodrigo Saraiva Cheida Mestre e Doutorando pelo DPCT

Universidade Estadual de Campinas !Resumo do projeto de Doutorado

O objetivo de minha pesquisa é compreender o desenvolvimento histórico, os atores e

iniciativas que contribuem para a organização da produção do conhecimento científico das

neurociências no Brasil. Especificamente, busca-se compreender os arranjos organizacionais e

mecanismos que determinam as principais características e práticas da produção da neurociência

brasileira, quais fatores que levaram determinados paradigmas de pesquisa serem dominantes na

área, como estes paradigmas conectam o conhecimento de diferentes especialistas, suas abordagens

teóricas, disciplinares, linhas de pesquisa e sistemas de conhecimento especializados. Desta forma,

esta pesquisa pretende contribuir na compreensão de como são formadas as comunidades

neurocientíficas brasileiras e sua relação com a formulação de políticas de saúde pública, a

organização de pesquisa e assistência nas Neurociências no Brasil.

A pesquisa em desenvolvimento se inspira no contexto em que as neurociências despontam

como um campo de pesquisa que promete revolucionar a compreensão do funcionamento e as

doenças do cérebro. Principalmente nos Estados Unidos da América e na Europa, pode-se afirmar

que tal campo do conhecimento científico é desenvolvido com estratégias persuasivas que buscam

lhe conferir credibilidade política e moral ao reivindicar o caráter revolucionário das pesquisas na

área. A evolução massiva de investimentos neste campo do conhecimento científico é acompanhada

de um discurso que enfatiza as descobertas dos processos de saúde e doenças do cérebro e suas

implicações na vida social e cultural dos seres humanos. Sendo assim, as neurociências e as

neurotecnologias (fármacos, técnicas de visualização cerebral entre outros dispositivos) ganham

imenso destaque na forma como agenciam a interpretação dos fluxos intraneuronais e nas

estratégias de intervenção sobre o cérebro.

!Os temas da Escola São Paulo em Ciência Avançada em Biotecnologia, Biossociabilidade e

Governança em Ciências da Vida, foram fundamentais para pensar tanto formas analíticas e os

métodos que utilizo em minha pesquisa. Destaco as palestras do Dr. Stephen Hilgartner, intitulada

The Human Genome Project, e a da Dra. Rayna Rapp, Science, Technology and Social Activism. �39

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A palestra do Dr. Hilgartner foi de extrema importância para minha pesquisa, pois o

palestrante apresentou sua pesquisa etnográfica na qual examinou como um regime de governança

foi criado durante os primeiros anos do Projeto Genoma Humano Norte-Americano. Nessa

pesquisa, Hilgartner conseguiu identificar como foi constituído o que ele denomina de “quadro do

governo”. Ou seja, a perspectiva do governo que orientou a organização de uma série de entidades

envolvidas no Projeto Genoma Humano nos Estados Unidos da América. A organização se deu de

forma implícita (não em um documento “constitucional”) e permitiu promover uma visão oficial da

qual os agentes envolvidos com o projeto foram dotados de direitos, deveres, poderes e

possibilidades. Esse regime de governança constituiu uma nova categoria de ciência, a “Biologia de

Larga Escala”, e o imaginário sóciotecnico para governá-la.

A palestra da Dra. Rayna Rapp foi também muito importante para minha pesquisa, pois

através da perspectiva da Antropologia da Saúde e da Doença, a pesquisadora chamou atenção para

o papel engajado que as etnografias da ciência e tecnologia possuem ao trazer em perspectiva a

construção da experiência da Saúde e da Doença na interação entre médicos e pacientes, em

diferentes contextos. Rapp tem um trabalho sobre a amniocentese, em que investiga como a noção

de risco é construída através dos dispositivos médicos e como as mulheres que enfrentam o teste

passam por decisões críticas sobre sua saúde e o futuro filho. A palestrante citou uma série de

trabalhos etnográficos produzidos sobre o tema em diferentes contextos e conseguiu colocar em

perspectiva como a percepção médica e do paciente varia diante desses casos apresentados.

A palestra de Hilgartner foi importante para refletir sobre o papel das entidades que estão

envolvidas com a produção neurocientífica no Brasil, a forma que se organizam e quais os atores

envolvidos. A pesquisa de Rapp, foi muito importante para pensar o método de minha pesquisa,

pois a etnografia do seu estudo de caso e dos diferentes casos citados que envolvem a perspectiva

antropológica em estudos da Saúde permite analisar as diferentes percepções dos atores envolvidos

com a saúde e a doença.

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Governing novelty: where does bureaucracy fit?!Rosanna Dent

Doctoral Candidate in History and Sociology of Science University of Pennsylvania !

Governance of new technologies for knowing, altering, and creating human bodies and populations

was a central discussion at the Escola São Paulo de Ciência Avançada em Biotecnologia,

Biossociabilidade e Governança em Ciências da Vida (ESPCA). Stephen Hilgartner opened the

course asking how we govern in the face of novelty, and how continuity interacts with efforts for

change within the life sciences. The ensuing lectures offered provocative, productive analysis of

these questions. Some addressed large-scale issues, such as Phil Mcnaughten’s transnational

comparison of GMO acceptance or Noela Invernizzi’s work on occupational health in

nanotechnology. At the other end of the spectrum, Aditya Bharadwaj’s ethnography of auto-

production and stem cell interventions in India together with Susanne Lettow and Rayna Rapp’s

discussions of the “bioeconomy of body bits” brought potent questions of need, desire, and

subjectivity to analyses of biotechnologies.

Despite these enticing discussions of politics and the personal, however, I was repeatedly

drawn to the more mundane question of paper pushing. Where does bureaucracy fit in these forms

of governance? How are existing systems of regulation expanding and mutating to confront

novelty? I was captivated by the speakers’ analyses of future making in emerging practices and

fields of study. But, caving to the historian’s focus on continuities, I am also curious as to the

institutionalization and routinization of these social and ethical practices, something perhaps more

accessible for cases with deeper historical context. The course raised key related questions for my

work: How have new forms of life and the biotechnologies that produce them been incorporated

into pre-existing ethical and moral frameworks? How has governance of the life sciences been

enacted on the practical, daily level of the government employee or the ethics committee member?

And finally, what can the examination of the past’s novelties tell us about the vanguard,

unimaginable, or rogue in the present?

One facet of my current research examines the ethical and regulatory systems that have has

governed the study of indigenous populations in Brazil over the past sixty years. Scholars, artists,

and explorers who traveled to indigenous communities from 1933 onward were expected to engage

with the bureaucracy of the Brazilian state. These researchers and regulators were also negotiating

novelty; whether in the 1950s or the 1980s, field practices, storage possibilities for biological

samples, and forms of political engagement with indigenous “subjects” were never static. Over �41

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time, ideas about ethical scientific engagement with humans have evolved. The institutions

responsible for oversight of this research have changed and multiplied. But have the changes in

bureaucracy been motivated by new technologies and practices? Do they effectively respond to

them? In many senses, the investment in governmentality that animates the Brazilian state’s

engagement with research regulation has remained constant: research on indigenous populations

made indigenous communities knowable in important ways.

My work suggests the original regulatory mission – to protect the interests of state

institutions – has mixed with, but has not entirely been replaced by the bioethical mission of

protecting indigenous bodies and communities. As the number of government agencies involved in

regulation has grown, what was rarely an efficient administrative process to begin with has grown

in complexity and required documentation. I understand this resulting regulatory system to be an

example of what Marie-Andrée Jacob and Annalise Riles refer to as a “bureaucracy of

virtue” (2007). With the professionalization of ethics, in a bureaucracy of virtue it becomes

increasingly central to demonstrate the ethical nature of research through documentation. This

emphasis on documentation is part of a routinization of research ethics, and at times takes away

from deeper reflection on the meaning of human interactions of scientific and medical research.

This routinization at the bureaucratic level has been met with vehement debate from both

social and natural scientists in Brazil. Likewise archival evidence shows varied and often nuanced

perspectives of individuals working within government agencies. However, the underlying

structures of regulation seem to privilege the expansion of paper-based ethics. The informed

consent form symbolizes an assurance of good governance. By mandating it, the state claims to

protect its scientific subjects. A historical perspective suggests these changes have not been driven

directly by new research practices or technologies. Rather, they have been more closely tied to

institutional politics than emerging ethical concerns.

For the rich case studies of our week in São Paulo, it seems clear that documentation and

routine in existing bureaucratic regimes will be insufficient to address such issues as transnational

surrogacy, international bioprospecting collaborations, and genome geographies. Bureaucratic

practice evolves gradually in comparison to scientific practice, and not always dialectically. The

lectures of ESPCA brought the implications of this disjuncture into sharp relief.

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Free Expression Pieces!!Genome!Lucia Ariza

Visiting Researcher Gino Germani Research Institute

University of Buenos Aires

This piece aims to celebrate the beauty of contemporary representations of (human) genomes, yet at

the same time to query their resonance among, or friendliness towards, non-expert publics. It also

intends to pose a question regarding the portrayal of variability and/or uniqueness in scientific

inscriptions of the genome. The work was inspired by images of genomes available from the web,

as well as by representations of nature at both the supra and subcellular levels.

Mixed media (Indian ink and sequins on paper).

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Activism and Academia!Raquel Velho

Doctoral candidate in Science and Technology Studies University College London

with financial support from the CAPES Foundation, Brazil !Inspired by Rayna Rapp’s final lecture at the Summer School, I was brought to think about how we

deal with the various paradoxes within academia. The one which troubles me most is that of

objectivity vs activism, the former being glorified and the latter feared in many circles. This short

reverie is the result of a free creative writing exercise where I tried to highlight the struggle one

might go through when striving for social change whilst being embedded in the age-old institution

of academia.

–––– –––– –––– –––– –––– –––– –––– –––– –––– –––– ––––

There are spaces in the world where silence reigns. Being invisible is the key to maintaining

stability, ensuring survival. Ripples in the pond might disturb something which slumbers in its

depths, and we cannot be sure what that something might be. So we don’t throw pebbles, and we

watch our step around murky puddles.

Growing up in these spaces makes us burrow within our skins, too shy to ask those around

us what they think about where it’s all going, where we are all going, together, as we try and find

even footing on our way there. Always avoiding the puddles, of course. We cannot reach the top of

the mountain if we have mud weighing us down, spattered on our shoes, or worse, on our tweed

jackets. These items of clothing which had originally started off as combat boots and a parka

morphed somewhere up the hill as we learnt that status quo is something difficult to shift.

The top of the hill. Upon reaching the prized destination, they say there comes a moment of

pride and joy as one admires the shining tower whose heavy doors beg to be thrown open. As it

catches the sunset in the right way, it reflects knowledge onto the world. A beacon to those who

perceive it from the right angle, its imposing nature does nothing to stop the distance from reducing

it to a mere twinkle. We, however, are confronted by its immensity; the blinding nature of its

whiteness, wholeness, an unwavering column looms and thrusts its shadow over us.

The pristine imagery of the ivory tower haunts us as we struggle through swamps of

methodology and deserts where inspiration is scarce. These are messy spaces, yet still we are told

that speaking about our failures will make us weak as we compete for appointments. So we imitate

those before us, as they were successful in this quest, and burrow. We hide our heads within our

books, finding solace in the fact that our colleagues and peers have done the same. In single file,

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noses stuck to glue and threaded binding, our academic qualification progresses. Voices mutter that

this is what it is all about; higher education requires dedication and perseverance, and these are

things you find within, not without. It could sound profound, but it reverberates as isolating.

Someone, somewhere in the middle of the line, trips and stumbles. The path is narrow and

most have become clumsy as their limbs acclimatised to repetitive movements. They topple over,

hands reaching for rocks, scattered books, stray roots or even discarded notes, searching for a ledge

to pull themselves back on track. It comes as a surprise that the fall is anything but steep, nor is it

very far to drop. Their boots have been scratched and there’s mud on their button-down shirt, and as

they shake off the dust and panic they realise: here’s another route! There’s a pregnant pause while

they take in the different path, attempting to make out what lies beyond it.

It seems abandoned, derelict, or even untouched. Here and there, however, there are hints of

someone having passed through this area before. Instead of cutting back the tops of trees and

personal narratives, someone has coaxed them out and braided them into guiding rails leading

deeper into a wild forest. They hesitate, but the path seems insistent and the forest’s ferocity

diminishes as they see more and more evidence of previous explorers having crossed it.

Uncharted territory is profoundly terrifying, even more so on one’s own. If at times we take

the path of least resistance, it might not be due to it being the easiest but rather because it appears to

be the only one. Beaming towers are such tempting analogies when one is striving towards

knowledge. Though they may be painted as menacing, their height and seclusion seem to give an

incredible vantage point over the rest of the world, particularly from the top of the hill. The path

there is simple to find, it has been imprinted into the very fabric of the world and all one must do is

avoid the puddles.

Somewhere along the way we might stumble. This can be an eye-opening moment where a

blunder serves as a lesson and weakness might begin to be questioned rather than squashed.

Hesitant voices might be heard over the murmuring of a wild forest where a plurality of others

experience deeply personal stories. The tower on the hill is so very far away from the forest of

others, yet from that distance it speaks of it in singular terms of great authority. Within the forest,

the various others are loud and unruly and combative, a confusing cacophony that deafens us as we

try to decipher it.

The choice between combat boots or tweed jackets. It too is a tempting imagery, and here

too we are blinded by its simplicity. Silence, however, should not reign where voices fight for

legitimacy. By all means, follow the path to the tower or take the route through the forest, but throw

a few pebbles in the pond and ripple the questions that lurk in its depths. �45

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Review of ‘The Great Transformation: The political and economic origins of our time’ (1944) by Karl Polanyi - A book

for lesser social scientists?!Samantha Vanderslott

Doctoral Candidate in Science and Technology Studies University College London !

During the ESPCA Summer School I was inspired by Dr Susanne Lettow (Goethe-Universität Frankfurt) who presented on ‘Bioeconomies, biopolitics and gender relations’ drawing upon Karl Polanyi through his concept of fictitious commodities. I have been a long-time fan of Polanyi’s work and decided to write a book review on his magnum opus. In Science and Technology Studies we normally only pay attention to his younger brother Michael Polanyi who wrote about tacit knowledge - I’m happy to see that Polanyi is being revisited and redeployed in new fields. !Abstract: Karl Polanyi’s seminal work The Great Transformation has had a unique reception over the years. This review considers the disciplinary reactions to a book that was published nearly 70 ago but still remains decisive among social scientists. The Great Transformation provides original thought on the relationship between society and the economy, which would seemingly be of interest for both economists and sociologists but this proves not to be the case.

***

What sparked my interest in The Great Transformation by Karl Polanyi is the reception it has

received over time. Critically acclaimed when first published, it was forgotten about for a number of

years, before being rediscovered in the late 20th century. In the 1940s the book was a timely account

of the contemporary state of affairs. Polanyi offered an explanation as to why the world seemed to be

falling apart, in the aftermath of two world wars, the upheaval of the industrial revolution and one

‘Great Depression’.

Beginning with the gloomy statement: “Nineteenth Century civilization has collapsed”

Polanyi goes on to root this claim in historical analysis and introduces a number of novel theoretical

concepts along the way. Notably this includes the idea of ‘embeddedness’, describing how the

market is embedded in society. It means that not only is society at times subordinated to the market

but also that attempts to separate the market from society through the self-regulating market is a

utopian ideal and unachievable. The other central concept is ‘fictitious commodities’ where Polanyi

warned of the dangers in commodifying land, labour and capital. These exist naturally and are not

produced exclusively for exchange, so will always present tensions in their treatment as commodities.

While clearly inspired by Marxist thought, ideologically Polanyi holds his own and was able to

provide another alternative to the traditional economic thinking of the day.

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His writings later became a perfect fit for opposition to neo-liberal market fundamentalism at

its height in the late 90s to early 2000s, because underlying Polanyi’s assertions about market society

is ammunition for critique of the free market. Today, in the context of economic crisis, The Great

Transformation offers theoretical underpinning to arguments about the destruction of society through

economic forces. However, despite being a rich potential source for thinking about both the economy

and society, it is a divisive book among social scientists. Economists have tended to ignore it, while

sociologists and others have had a keen interest. Why then have some schools of thought taken to

Polanyi while others dismiss him entirely?

An intriguing exchange went on a couple of years ago in the context of a book review, which

goes some way in answering this question. Greg Clark, economics professor at the University of

California, Davis reviewed The Great Transformation . He argued against the enduring allure that: 18

‘markets corrupt societies’ and defended free market capitalism as a “resilient and stable system”. He

criticised Polanyi as an inaccurate historian and poor predictor of future events but criticised the

readers of Polanyi even more, going on to make a full-scale attack on those who put Polanyi on their

curriculums. In return, Fred Block a sociologist at the same institution posted his response . He 19

objected to Clark changing the subject from a book review to a disagreement with free market critics,

his “real targets - those lesser social sciences such as sociology, political science, and anthropology -

that have found Polanyi’s work to be extraordinarily useful.”

Block does points out that there are some economists, such as Nobel-prize winner Joseph

Stiglitz who are pro-Polanyi. Still, Stiglitz does stand somewhat alone. Apart from the handful of

economic historians who have variously drawn on or objected to Polanyi’s historical account, there is

a limited number of economists who have been inspired by him. On the other hand there is an

appropriation of Polanyi by sociologists to provide alternatives to economic thinking about markets,

guiding critiques of neoliberalism. This is where the economists come in: to object to an

encroachment on their territory and over-preoccupation with economics. To some economists,

sociologists are trying and failing to provide valuable contributions to their discipline . 20

Thus, this book has reached an interesting position in intellectual debate. It stands alone to a

degree between disciplines and is part rhetorical device but also contains some enduring concepts.

The Great Transformation has served as more than a book in itself but an embodiment of a

battleground within the social sciences, where the moveable lines between economics and sociology

become contentious in the process.

�47

" http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-the-great-transformation-by-karl/79250/18

" http://www.longviewinstitute.org/nosuchthing19

" See: http://economics.mit.edu/files/3076 20

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