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 Faculty of Medicine 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. Having taken coursework in epidemiology and biostatistics at McMaster during the early 1980s as evidence based medicine was gaining ground, Janice is interested in how ambiguities within systems of belief (e.g., holding a position in logical scientific assessment and evidence based medicine while maintaining practices that lack scientific evidence) affect human practices, scientific negotiations, and political decision making. Her current research revolves around regulatory practices and policy, the determination of therapeutic efficacy, research ethics, conflict of interest, and stakeholder understandings of evidence and therapeutic success.

For many Canadians, regulatory processes are obscure, unclear, and unfathomable. A recently rewarded CIHR operating grant (MOP – 74473) allows Graham’s postdoctoral fellows and graduate students to follow and describe regulatory actors and their tasks, map the regulatory territory of scientific evidence and policy decisions, and illustrate how a regulatory system adapts to rapidly emerging scientific and policy changes, external factors, and societal contingencies. They show how the science and policy of regulation works and dispel the prevalent image of “the black box” of regulation.

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.