Javier Lezaun
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 126689 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Javier Lezaun |
| NOMBRES | Javier |
| APELLIDO | Lezaun |
| FIRMA | LEZAUN J |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Oxford |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5483-3628 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 58 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 724 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 58 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2002 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 12 |
Roundabout methods
This article analyzes the historical emergence of a decidedly cinematic approach to social-scientific experimentation: The shift from a model of inquiry in which film serves as a tool to record kinetic events generated under experimental conditions to one in which experimental situations are arranged and filmed narratively to maximize their demonstrative power. This evolution becomes starkly visible when one compares the pioneering use of film by…
Agrarian counterpoint
In Colombia's northeastern borderlands, agrarian economies shape how disease risk and stigma are understood and managed. As shown in ethnographic fieldwork in and around the Catatumbo region, cutaneous leishmaniasis—a sandfly‐transmitted disease that produces chronic skin lesions—appears in two radically different guises across adjacent territories. In coca‐growing areas, the disease is driven underground and treated as a marker of criminality. I…
Extending public health framings of drug use to the health impacts of drug production
This article critically examines the absence of a public health approach to the well-being of coca leaf producers in Colombia, a group disproportionately affected by the War on Drugs. While harm reduction frameworks address drug consumption as a public health issue, no comparable strategy has been developed to tackle the health vulnerabilities afflicting those involved in drug production . Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews in Catatu…
Grappling with a sea change
We conducted interviews with 35 experts involved in mCDR research and development. • Interviews revealed tensions regarding four themes. • Expert consensus on these tensions is unlikely, but they raise important questions. • Governance of mCDR would benefit from exploring these in expert and public fora. While research on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) expands apace, significant unknowns persist regarding the risks and benefits of individua…
Publics and counter-publics of net-zero
The proliferation of pledges to reach net-zero emissions has revealed a wide range of understandings of what such a pledge entails. The lack of international standards to define decarbonisation pathways and the many kinds of speculative offsets available for net-zero calculations have generated a multiplication of public commitments not tethered to any specific mechanism of accountability. Many have criticised this state of affairs as a governanc…
Can ‘Net Zero’ still be an instrument of climate justice
The meaning of net zero and how to get it right
Global Health, Accelerated
A new paradigm of emergency R&D has transformed global health. Beginning with the 2014–2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa, experimental product development has been propelled to the frontlines of outbreak response, radically compressing timelines and unsettling regulatory standards, biosecurity strategies and humanitarian protocols. This paper examines these emerging epistemic practices and ethical norms as they played out in the cr…
The changing climates of global health
International audience
Lessons of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict for Public Health
In early 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic revealed a faceless, non-adversarial threat that endangered Israelis and Palestinians with the same ferocity. However, the capacities of the health systems to address it were not equal, with Israel more equipped for the outbreak with infrastructure, resources, manpower and later, vaccines. The pandemic demonstrated the life-saving benefits of cooperation and the self-defeating harms brought by non-cooperation.…
Imperfect diagnosis
When the Zika virus burst onto the international scene in the second half of 2015, the development of diagnostic tools was seen as an urgent global health priority. Diagnostic capacity was restricted to a small number of reference laboratories, and none of the few available molecular or serological tests had been validated for extensive use in an outbreak setting. In the early weeks of the crisis, key funders stepped in to accelerate research and…
The Immune Home
This essay tracks a paradigm shift in the use of chemicals to control malaria: away from insecticidal approaches, focused on killing mosquitoes within private domestic dwellings, and toward the creation of protective communal atmospheres. An ongoing study of the efficacy of spatial repellents to reduce malaria transmission in rural Tanzania provides an opportunity to rethink the oikographic assumptions of malaria control-and of many global health…
Setting the standard
There is increasing concern globally about the enormity of the threats posed by antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to human, animal, plant and environmental health. A proliferation of international, national and institutional reports on the problems posed by AMR and the need for antibiotic stewardship have galvanised attention on the global stage. However, the AMR community increasingly laments a lack of action, often identified as an ‘implementation…
Setting the agenda for social science research on the human microbiome
The human microbiome is an important emergent area of cross, multi and transdisciplinary study. The complexity of this topic leads to conflicting narratives and regulatory challenges. It raises questions about the benefits of its commercialisation and drives debates about alternative models for engaging with its publics, patients and other potential beneficiaries. The social sciences and the humanities have begun to explore the microbiome as an o…
Incentivising bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) responsibly
Uncertainty in times of medical emergency
Uncertainty was a defining feature of the Brazilian Zika crisis of 2015-2016. The cluster of cases of neonatal microcephaly detected in the country's northeast in the second half of 2015, and the possibility that a new virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes was responsible for this new syndrome, created a deep sense of shock and confusion in Brazil and around the world. When in February 2016 the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of Internatio…
Governance by campaign
This paper considers food as a site of public engagement with science and technology. Specifically, we focus on how public engagement with food is envisioned and operationalised by one non-profit organisation, foodwatch. Founded in Germany in 2002, foodwatch extensively uses new information and communication technologies to inform consumers about problematic food industry practices. In this paper, we present our analysis of 50 foodwatch e-newslet…
The deferred promise of radical cure
This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the career over the last four decades of a single molecule, tafenoquine. First identified as a promising antimalarial by the US Army in the 1970s, tafenoquine has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the radical cure of vivax malaria – the first product to receive marketing authorization for this indication in more than 65 years. The …
Crafting a public for geoengineering
In a short period of time, climate ‘geoengineering’ has been added to the list of technoscientific issues subject to deliberative public engagement. Here, we analyse this rapid trajectory of publicization and explore the particular manner in which the possibility of intentionally altering the Earth’s climate system to curb global warming has been incorporated into the field of ‘public engagement with science’. We describe the initial framing of g…
Responsible Innovation and political accountability
In this paper, we analyse the introduction of genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes in Brazil and use this case to probe the notion of Responsible Innovation and its applicability to the development of new public health biotechnologies in the global South. OX513A, a strain of GM Aedes aegypti mosquitoes developed by the British firm Oxitec, has been used experimentally in Brazil since 2009, when it was imported into the country as a promising new …
Reframing rights
In the chapter that closes this edited volume, Sheila Jasanoff wonders about the wisdom of adding a new composite word – bioconstitutionalism – to the exploding lexicon of bio-prefixed terms. “In a
Public perceptions of geoengineering research governance
Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate ‘geoengineering’ have demonstrated the deeply controversial nature of this field of scientific research. Social scientists have begun to explore public perceptions of geoengineering, and have documented a significant degree of concern over the effective governance of research and experimentation in this area. Yet, public perception on what constitutes a legitimate geoengineering experiment and how…
The Wild Indoors
This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation of mosquitoes: the insectary, the semifield station, and the outdoors. We approach each of these settings as creating a distinct mode of interiority, a particular room-space. This concept resets the investigative encounter in terms of an aesthetic of attention, and offers a counterpoint to the ideals of control and containment that dominate biosecurit…
Twilight in the leadership playground
What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test …
Missing the (question) mark? What is a turn to ontology
Our introductory essay in this journal's 2013 Special Issue on the 'turn to ontology' examined the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies and explored the implications of the notion of enactment. Three responses to that Special Issue argue that (1) there is no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and social constructivism, (2) we need to be wary of overly generic use of the term 'ontology'…
The wrong bin bag
There is in science and technology studies a perceptible new interest in matters of 'ontology'. Until recently, the term 'ontology' had been sparingly used in the field. Now it appears to have acquired a new theoretical significance and lies at the centre of many programmes of empirical investigation. The special issue to which this essay is a contribution gathers a series of enquiries into the ontological and reflects, collectively, on the value…
Materials and devices of the public
This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predomi…
Urban mosquitoes, situational publics, and the pursuit of interspecies separation in Dar es Salaam
Recent work in anthropology points to the recognition of multispecies entanglements as the grounds for a more ethical politics. In this article, we examine efforts to control mosquitoes in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, as an example of the laborious tasks of disentanglement that characterize public health interventions. The mosquito surveillance and larval elimination practices of an urban malaria control program offer an opportunity to observe how ef…
A Market of Opinions
Provoking a conversation among a small group of people gathered in a room has become a widespread way of generating useful knowledge.1 The focus group is today a pervasive technology of social investigation, a versatile experimental setting where a multitude of ostensibly heterogeneous issues, from politics to economics, from voting to spending, can be productively addressed.2 Marketing is the field in which the focus group has acquired its most …
Missing the (question) mark? What is a turn to ontology
Our introductory essay in this journal's 2013 Special Issue on the 'turn to ontology' examined the shift from epistemology to ontology in science and technology studies and explored the implications of the notion of enactment. Three responses to that Special Issue argue that (1) there is no fundamental qualitative difference between the ontological turn and social constructivism, (2) we need to be wary of overly generic use of the term 'ontology'…
Creating a New Object of Government
Since the late 1990s, the European Union (EU) has embarked on an effort to make fully traceable and identifiable every genetically modified organism (GMO) that travels through its territory. New regulations force market operators to record the presence of genetically modified material in foods and feed, and to pass this information along in every transaction, thus creating a continuous paper trail for every bioengineered organism as it moves thro…
Public perceptions of geoengineering research governance
Recent attempts to conduct experiments in climate ‘geoengineering’ have demonstrated the deeply controversial nature of this field of scientific research. Social scientists have begun to explore public perceptions of geoengineering, and have documented a significant degree of concern over the effective governance of research and experimentation in this area. Yet, public perception on what constitutes a legitimate geoengineering experiment and how…
Provocative Containment and the Drift of Social-Scientific Realism
The post-World War II period gave rise to a large number of social-scientific techniques for investigating and intervening in social reality. A particular group of these, exemplified here by the experiments of Moreno, Lewin, Bion, Milgram and Zimbardo, worked by establishing suggestive micro-realities in which participants were exposed to, or experimented with, selected ‘social problems’. We investigate the nature of these techniques – being simu…
Bees, Beekeepers, and Bureaucrats
Over the last decade the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees have become a matter of public policy in the European Union. Determined to establish a system where transgenic crops can 'coexist' with conventional and organic farming, the EU has begun to erect a system of demarcations and separations designed to minimize the extent of 'gene flow' from genetically modified plants. As the European landscape is regimented through the introduct…
The Pharmaceutical Commons
In the last decade, the organization of pharmaceutical research on neglected tropical diseases has undergone transformative change. In a context of perceived "market failure," the development of new medicines is increasingly handled by public-private partnerships. This shift toward hybrid organizational models depends on a particular form of exchange: the sharing of proprietary assets in general and of intellectual property rights in particular. …
Uncertainty in times of medical emergency
Uncertainty was a defining feature of the Brazilian Zika crisis of 2015-2016. The cluster of cases of neonatal microcephaly detected in the country's northeast in the second half of 2015, and the possibility that a new virus transmitted by Aedes mosquitoes was responsible for this new syndrome, created a deep sense of shock and confusion in Brazil and around the world. When in February 2016 the WHO declared a Public Health Emergency of Internatio…
The Wild Indoors
This article examines three locations where entomologists engage in the experimental observation of mosquitoes: the insectary, the semifield station, and the outdoors. We approach each of these settings as creating a distinct mode of interiority, a particular room-space. This concept resets the investigative encounter in terms of an aesthetic of attention, and offers a counterpoint to the ideals of control and containment that dominate biosecurit…
Twilight in the leadership playground
What sort of reality is produced and conveyed to the business trainee through the set of pedagogical techniques that characterize the experiential business curriculum, and how does immersion in this particular kind of reality configure the business self? This essay discusses some of the rhetorical and theatrical contrivances that are used to generate artificial business situations in which the student can experience a moment of decision and test …
Offshore democracy
In the 1970s a group of social scientists attempted to create a new, more democratic form of work organization aboard the Norwegian merchant ship Balao. To do so they redesigned the physical structure of the ship to facilitate the emergence of a participatory shipboard community. This paper revisits the journeys of Balao as an example of the potential and limits of experimental democracies. It describes the processes of social miniaturization imp…
Containment and competition
Incentivising bioenergy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS) responsibly
Walking or Waiting? Topologies of the Breeding Ground in Malaria Control
Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumulation of stagnant water where disease-carrying insects lay their eggs. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus were identified as the vector of malaria transmission, these aquatic habitats have been a key object of epidemiological research and public health intervention against the disease. Yet the breeding gro…
In the Political Laboratory
In a series of groundbreaking studies conducted in the late 1930s at the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, the émigré German psychologist Kurt Lewin and his graduate student Ronald Lippitt transformed the relationship between social-scientific experimentation and political design. In the controlled, confined space of the laboratory they were able to produce, they claimed, distinct political 'climates'. Authoritarian, laissez-faire and, most pr…
Global Health, Accelerated
A new paradigm of emergency R&D has transformed global health. Beginning with the 2014–2016 Ebola virus disease epidemic in West Africa, experimental product development has been propelled to the frontlines of outbreak response, radically compressing timelines and unsettling regulatory standards, biosecurity strategies and humanitarian protocols. This paper examines these emerging epistemic practices and ethical norms as they played out in the cr…
Imperfect diagnosis
When the Zika virus burst onto the international scene in the second half of 2015, the development of diagnostic tools was seen as an urgent global health priority. Diagnostic capacity was restricted to a small number of reference laboratories, and none of the few available molecular or serological tests had been validated for extensive use in an outbreak setting. In the early weeks of the crisis, key funders stepped in to accelerate research and…
The deferred promise of radical cure
This paper explores the changing political economy of malaria drug discovery by tracing the career over the last four decades of a single molecule, tafenoquine. First identified as a promising antimalarial by the US Army in the 1970s, tafenoquine has recently been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for the radical cure of vivax malaria – the first product to receive marketing authorization for this indication in more than 65 years. The …
Limiting the Social
Limiting the Social: Constructivism and Social Knowledge in International Relations Get access Javier Lezaun Javier Lezaun Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Review, Volume 4, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 229–234, https://doi.org/10.1111/1521-9488.00272 Published: 13 June 2003
Eloquence and incommensurability
On the seventh day of the trial of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, William Jennings Bryan was cross-examined by Clarence Darrow. What ensued was one of the most famous exchanges in American legal history, and a constant referent in the struggle between religious Fundamentalists and defenders of academic freedom and natural evolution. Many saw in Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan a moment of revelation, a dramatic instantiation of the…
Grappling with a sea change
We conducted interviews with 35 experts involved in mCDR research and development. • Interviews revealed tensions regarding four themes. • Expert consensus on these tensions is unlikely, but they raise important questions. • Governance of mCDR would benefit from exploring these in expert and public fora. While research on marine carbon dioxide removal (mCDR) expands apace, significant unknowns persist regarding the risks and benefits of individua…
The Immune Home
This essay tracks a paradigm shift in the use of chemicals to control malaria: away from insecticidal approaches, focused on killing mosquitoes within private domestic dwellings, and toward the creation of protective communal atmospheres. An ongoing study of the efficacy of spatial repellents to reduce malaria transmission in rural Tanzania provides an opportunity to rethink the oikographic assumptions of malaria control-and of many global health…
Limiting the Social
Limiting the Social: Constructivism and Social Knowledge in International Relations Get access Javier Lezaun Javier Lezaun Cornell University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Studies Review, Volume 4, Issue 3, December 2002, Pages 229–234, https://doi.org/10.1111/1521-9488.00272 Published: 13 June 2003
Science, Social Theory and Public Knowledge
Food Control Emergencies and the Territorialization of the European Union
This article addresses the response of European institutions to a series of food control emergencies: the BSE crisis of 1996, the dioxin scandal of 1999, and the introduction of an illegal genetically modified organism in 2005. The protection of European consumers from threats arising in the food chain has become a core value of the European polity and a basic function of its institutional apparatus. It is argued that in order to fulfil this func…
Creating a New Object of Government
Since the late 1990s, the European Union (EU) has embarked on an effort to make fully traceable and identifiable every genetically modified organism (GMO) that travels through its territory. New regulations force market operators to record the presence of genetically modified material in foods and feed, and to pass this information along in every transaction, thus creating a continuous paper trail for every bioengineered organism as it moves thro…
Consulting citizens
The new centrality of “the public” to the governance of science and technology has been accompanied by a widespread use of public consultation mechanisms designed to elicit from citizens relevant opinions on technoscientific matters. This paper explores the configuration of legitimate constituencies in two such exercises: the UK “ GM Nation?” public debate on food biotechnology, and a Swedish “Transparency Forum” on the risks of mobile telephones…
Towards a Bioeconomy
What do Bioethicists Read
Breast Cancer Genetics and the Practice of Health
Experiment
Experiments play a central role in most theories of science as the key mechanism through which theories and hypotheses are corroborated or refuted. Most especially in the work of Karl Popper, the acceptability of a theory – the extent to which it can be conceivably characterized as “scientific” – is determined by its falsifiability, that is, by whether it can be put to the test in an experiment. Experimentation is thus the foremost trial of stren…
Speaking Truth to Power
Speaking truth to power” refers to the belief that scientists, unimpeded by economic self‐interest or partisan bias, will deliver honest and often uncomfortable truths to those in positions of power
A Market of Opinions
Provoking a conversation among a small group of people gathered in a room has become a widespread way of generating useful knowledge.1 The focus group is today a pervasive technology of social investigation, a versatile experimental setting where a multitude of ostensibly heterogeneous issues, from politics to economics, from voting to spending, can be productively addressed.2 Marketing is the field in which the focus group has acquired its most …
Ethnographic Expeditions into Psychiatry
Differences that Matter
Animal Evidence
Self-contained Bioethics and the Politics of Legal Prohibition
Law and bioethics have traditionally expressed an elective affinity. Bioethics has often spoken “in the language of the law,” or at least in a pidgin that the law can easily understand, and bioethicists have conceptualized their principles and arguments in ways that make them amenable to legal translation. However, there has always been a tradition of bioethical reflection, what I describe as “self-contained bioethics,” that is deeply suspicious …
Books Forum
Books Forum
Eloquence and incommensurability
On the seventh day of the trial of The State of Tennessee vs. John Thomas Scopes, William Jennings Bryan was cross-examined by Clarence Darrow. What ensued was one of the most famous exchanges in American legal history, and a constant referent in the struggle between religious Fundamentalists and defenders of academic freedom and natural evolution. Many saw in Darrow’s interrogation of Bryan a moment of revelation, a dramatic instantiation of the…
Bees, Beekeepers, and Bureaucrats
Over the last decade the flying patterns and foraging behavior of bees have become a matter of public policy in the European Union. Determined to establish a system where transgenic crops can 'coexist' with conventional and organic farming, the EU has begun to erect a system of demarcations and separations designed to minimize the extent of 'gene flow' from genetically modified plants. As the European landscape is regimented through the introduct…
Offshore democracy
In the 1970s a group of social scientists attempted to create a new, more democratic form of work organization aboard the Norwegian merchant ship Balao. To do so they redesigned the physical structure of the ship to facilitate the emergence of a participatory shipboard community. This paper revisits the journeys of Balao as an example of the potential and limits of experimental democracies. It describes the processes of social miniaturization imp…
Materials and devices of the public
This introduction provides an overview of material- or device-centred approaches to the study of public participation, and articulates the theoretical contributions of the four papers that make up this special section. Set against the background of post-Foucauldian perspectives on the material dimensions of citizenship and engagement – perspectives that treat matter as a tacit, constituting force in the organization of collectives and are predomi…
Endless Qualifications, Restless Consumption
Functional foods and foods derived from genetically modified organisms represent two forms of intervention in the design of foodstuffs that have given rise to distinct political and regulatory dynamics. In Europe, regulatory agencies have tried, unsuccessfully, to affix a definitive legal meaning to these categories of food artificiality. This incomplete process of legal disambiguation has gone hand in hand with the delegation of the responsibili…
The Pragmatic Sanction of Materials
How is the law bound to the material world? This article examines the production of reference materials, artefacts that incarnate legally relevant measurements and serve as a transitional object for the law in its approximation to the stuff of the world. The argument, an opening for an ethnographic investigation into the life of legal materials, is based on a study of the work conducted at the Institute for Reference Materials and Measurements (I…
The escalating politics of ‘Big Biology’
Walking or Waiting? Topologies of the Breeding Ground in Malaria Control
Few places bear as much historical and scientific significance as the breeding ground, the accumulation of stagnant water where disease-carrying insects lay their eggs. Since the turn of the twentieth century, when mosquitoes of the Anopheles genus were identified as the vector of malaria transmission, these aquatic habitats have been a key object of epidemiological research and public health intervention against the disease. Yet the breeding gro…
Political science (45 obras) · Law (30 obras) · Sociology (30 obras) · Law (23 obras) · Politics (21 obras) · Medicine (19 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Economics (16 obras) · Public relations (14 obras) · Business (12 obras)