Local and global practices of science, technology and medicine have increasingly targeted our bodies, producing translocal sites of compromise, categorization and contestation. We are promised the benefits of biotechnologies while simultaneously exposed to their associated risks (environmental decline, chronic illness, gene escape, new viruses, super bacteria, tissue markets). Supported by publicly-funded and corporate-driven industrial research agendas, these technologies create new ways of representing biological and cultural facts.

Who and what drives these ventures and values and

how can we best come to understand them?

Our research unit, in the Department of Pediatrics (Infectious Disease) at Dalhousie University, uses a science and technology studies conceptual framework and multi-sited ethnographic methodological approaches to understand how these biological and cultural facts emerge. Science studies allows us to treat data, information, concepts, disease, diagnosis, measurement instruments, regulation, technological and risk assessment, and profits as “actors” engaged in diverse practices and “entangled in a web of relations and connections”.

We apply a variety of interdisciplinary approaches including actor network theory to local and globally-situated case-studies where we can track the relationships of human and non-human entities in the regulation of emerging therapeutic and food products, such as GMOs, pharmaceuticals, biologics, and vaccines. The fieldwork sites for our research include clinical trials, expert committees, scientists and policy analysts and makers at Health Canada, the norms and standardization committees of the World Health Organization, agbiotech laboratories in Canada and the developing world, and patient activist groups negotiating pharmaceutical industry funding.

Janice Graham contributes a medical anthropological approach that incorporates epidemiological critical appraisal methodologies to understanding the fashioning of diagnostic criteria for cognitive impairment and the dementias, especially as therapies that have emerged to treat dementia.

Our multi-sited ethnographic projects are situated in laboratories (public and private, developed and developing countries), in biotechnology and pharmaceutical corporate offices, and in government regulatory agencies. Our Research Team invites disciplinary diversity and includes anthropologists and sociologists of medicine, science and technology, molecular biologists, political scientists; bioethicists, lawyers and historians of risk and regulation.

• Director: Janice Graham

• TRRU Research Team