Dalhousie University - Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit TRRU Announcements

PCIRN (PHAC/CIHR Influenza Research Network)

Dr. Alexander Borda Rodriguez has been awared a research grant to conduct a qualitative study on health care worker and labour union attitudes in Nova Scotia towards voluntary and mandatory vaccination of influenza.

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Canadian Anthropology Society / Société canadienne anthropologie

Professor Janice Graham has been elected President of the Canadian Anthropology Society/Société canadienne anthropologie. At the annual meetings in Montreal May 31-June 3, she has organized and is chairing a CASCA-CIHR-SSHRC Roundtable forum on the new funding initiatives for health research in Canada. She has also organized and is chairing a session on The Anthropology of Vaccines with her postdoctoral fellows Farah Huzair, Amrita Mishra, Alex Borda-Rodriguez and Marylene Dugas, which presents preliminary findings from the CIHR grant "Regulatory challenges to the development of new vaccines: Mapping emergent relations between science, evidence and policy."

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Contesting Aging & Loss, a new book

Dr. Janice Graham and Dr. Peter Stephenson are the co-editors of the new book Contesting Aging and Loss, published in April 2010 by the University of Toronto Press. This work takes a look at ways in which the idea that older adults are necessarily in decline causes problems in itself.

The dominant biomedical paradigm of loss has seeped into too common a practice of engaging elders on terms that are not their own. Instead, Contesting Aging & Loss approaches aging from the viewpoint of those growing old. The contributors to this book take seriously the proposition that aging is complex and multifaceted and encompasses many experiences including those that entail a deep sense of loss. But so too, they discover people who are continuing to encounter fulfilments, gains, struggles and resistances.

The voices heard here contest the dominant paradigm of disease, decline and dementia, and the idea that much of what we experience as we age is simply “inevitable”, a perspective that robs us all of power, agency, and the ability to determine and live fulfilled lives –– whether we are engaged in the study of aging, or are simply growing old. As such, the book is meant as a corrective based on ethnographic evidence. Drawing from South Africa, the Netherlands, Australia and Canada, the stories presented here speak to a dubious connection of the aging and loss paradigm with another dominant paradigm: a free market economic one that ignores the determinants of unequal power, resources, and income.

These stories provide a rich conceptual and empirical resource for a seniors-centred approach to living and continuing to grow from those whose lives in many parts of the world reflect a richness that is generally lost in more prosaic studies of aging which depend on statistical information and which often paint an overly simplistic image of despair as numbers dwindle and graphs arc ever downward.

"Contesting Aging & Loss is a superb example of critical gerontology,” says Dr. Keating, Chair of the International Association of Gerontology and Geriatrics.

“Contesting Aging & Loss provides a richness of thought for the experienced policy-maker, academic, and the up-and-coming student concerned with the challenging concepts of loss and aging,” says JF Kozak, Providence Health Care, Vancouver.

For more information, or to purchase a copy, please visit: http://www.utppublishing.com/product.php?productid=2662&cat=0&page=1

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CCfV Symposium 2010

The Canadian Centre for Vaccinology (CCfV) held their annual symposium on April 22nd at the IWK Health Centre, Halifax, Nova Sotia. TRRU researchers Dr. Farah Huzair, Dr. Amrita Mishra and Dr. Janice Graham presented their poster entitled '21st Century Vaccines'.

For more information on the CCfV please visit: http://www.centerforvaccinology.ca/

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CADTH Symposium 2010

The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH) held their annual symposium in Halifax, Nova Scotia, April 18th to 20th at the Halifax Marriott Harbourfront. TRRU researchers Dr. Janice Graham, Dr. Farah Huzair and Dr. Alexander Borda-Rodriguez presented their poster entitled 'Dynamic Capabilities and Knowledge Translation in Canada during the H1N1 Pandemic' on Sunday, April 18th.

For more information please visit: http://www.cadth.ca/symposium2010

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CADTH Seminar / Web Cast - Health Information - Is It A Public Good?

The Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health (CADTH) is holding a web seminar on the international movement and development of need for increased transparency of health information and the barriers often associated with open knowledge and sharing. This seminar will include open discussion from a full range of stakeholders, including our very own Dr. Janice Graham, an invited discussant.

Date: Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Time: 1:00PM - 3:00PM (EDT)

Location: Canadian Agency for Drugs and Technologies in Health, 2nd Floor Council Chambers, Carling Avenue, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada

Please note that registration is required; participation by person in Ottawa, or by web cast via your computer. For more information, or to download the registration form, we invite you to visit the CADTH website.

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Invited Speaker

Congraulations to Dr. Janice Graham on being iinvited by the University of Victoria, Department of Anthropology to be a Lansdowne Lecturer! Dr. Graham will present on 18 March, 2010 at a Public Lecture entitled; Safer, Better, Faster: Will Drugs Be Safer or Just Easier to Get?

New Team Productivity Report

Click here to see the TRRU Team Productivity Report (April 2009).

New Members

We are pleased to welcome Amrita Mishra, Farah Huzair and Alexander Borda-Rodriguez to the TRRU team.

Dr. Emma Varley, a Killam Scholar, recently joined the TRRU team.

The Killam Scholarship recognizes the very best in graduate and postgraduate education. Dalhousie is one of only four universities in Canada to award Killam Scholarships and Prizes, which have made a huge difference in the lives and research of its recipient graduate students and postdoctoral fellows.

Emma Varley received her MA in Anthropology at UBC in 2002, and completed her Ph.D. in Medical Anthropology at the University of Toronto in September 2008, under the supervision of Dr Michael Lambek. In 2008, she published two chapters concerning her doctoral fieldwork in Pakistan's Northern Areas, its focus on women’s reproductive health amid sectarian conflict and also fieldwork methods during strife. She is currently preparing articles based on her thesis, as well as recent consultancy work in southern Thailand on behalf of CIHR, where she investigated post-tsunami health service provision. Since 1998, Emma has also authored and co-authored numerous policy reports during overseas consultancies, including research on behalf of SEVA Canada in Tanzania, the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme in Pakistan’s Northern Areas and the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, Pakistan. As part of her Fellowship in Bioethics, Emma intends to produce a book and several journal articles, as well as conference and lecture, concerning the inter-relationships between Islam, women’s health and use of biomedical and traditional health services, and patient-physician interactions – both internationally and with special regard to Halifax and the Maritimes.

Christina Holmes successfully defended her dissertation entitled:
Seeds, Scientists & Genetically Modified Organisms: Genetic Engineering Practices and Global Connections in April 2008 and graduated with her PhD in Social Anthropology from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada. Christina is currently an Assistant Professor at Dalhousie.

Elizabeth Toller successfully completed her thesis entitled: Framing Regulation as Competitive Advantage: an Anthropological Analysis of Natural Health Product Commercialization in April 2008 and graduated with her Masters in Social Anthropology from the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. Elizabeth is currently working for Health Canada in Ottawa, in Strategic Horizontal Policy and Regulatory Affairs.

TRRU is an interdisciplinary team of researchers led by medical anthropologist and Canada Research Chair, Professor Janice Graham. We draw from anthropology, sociology, biomedicine and political science to study configurations of technoscience and risk.

Our research group at Dalhousie University in Halifax uses a science and technology studies conceptual framework and multi-sited ethnographic methodological approach to understand how scientific and cultural facts emerge. While our primary research site is Canada, our members have conducted research in Burkina Faso, Colombia and the United Kingdom.

Technoscience and Regulation Research Unit

Dalhousie University

5849 University Avenue

CRC Room 315

Halifax, Nova Scotia
Canada

B3H 4H7

phone: 902.494.6733
fax: 902.494.3865

email: trru@dal.ca