Klaus Hoeyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 118089 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Klaus Hoeyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Klaus |
| FAMILY NAME | Hoeyer |
| SIGNATURE | HOEYER K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2780-4784 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 63 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 371 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Bold claims about health data: Exploring economic estimates in policy and consultancy reports
What is health data worth? How much money could we save, or generate, by sharing health data across borders? Such questions are now routinely posed in policy and consultancy reports. If raised 50 years ago, such questions probably would have been perceived as peculiar. The value of health data was clinical and administrative, not economic. Today, however, economic estimates on the value of health data are ever more present in policymaking. In thi…
Selective visibility in datafied states: Examining the absence and presence of the European Health Data Space
Of Knights and Knaves, Charlatans and Crooks: The Data Practices of Quality Management in General Practice
The right standard for the job? On the limits of standard setting as a tool for governing commercial actors
Data standards play a key role in the governance of commercial actors on the market for health data. This commentary explores expectations for standard-setting in the European Health Data Space (EHDS), a pivotal legal initiative for facilitation of cross-border health data exchange. While EHDS aims to establish shared standards for interoperability and innovation in the European Union (EU) and affiliated countries, the analysis reveals some of th…
A qualitative comparison of data infrastructures for Covid-19 health-related data: Lessons for the European Health Data Space
The COVID-19 pandemic has represented the first global health emergency to be tackled through widespread data collection via a broad array of digital health technologies. Throughout Europe, data infrastructures for the acquisition, processing, and management of COVID-19 data were either implemented ex novo or “repurposed” towards this end. Analysing and comparing these data practices may hold great value to the upcoming European Health Data Space…
Data on the Mind: How the Data on the Use of Force in Psychiatry Interacts with Professional Judgment
Psychiatric clinicians and managers increasingly use data to monitor the use of force on psychiatric patients. In this study, we describe how Danish authorities simultaneously emphasise a need for close data monitoring and tell a story of failure: rather than reducing force, they claim that data monitoring of mechanical restraint has simply replaced this type of force with other types. We show here how the official narrative of failure is based o…
Afterword: The politics of suspension as an analytical gestalt switch
Health in data space: Formative and experiential dimensions of cross-border health data sharing
Healthcare is increasingly datafied, and a wide range of actors-patients, clinicians, administrators, policymakers, and industry lobbyists-want to be able to exchange and access health data internationally and use them for an increasing number of purposes. Therefore, competing initiatives aimed at fostering international data integration proliferate, with the proposed European Health Data Space as one of the most prominent examples. But how do le…
Speed, accuracy, and efficiency: The promises and practices of digitization in pathology
Digitization is often presented in policy discourse as a panacea to a multitude of contemporary problems, not least in healthcare. How can policy promises relating to digitization be assessed and potentially countered in particular local contexts? Based on a study in Denmark, we suggest scrutinizing the politics of digitization by comparing policy promises about the future with practitioners' experience in the present. While Denmark is one of the…
Data driven or data informed? How general practitioners use data to evaluate their own and colleagues' clinical work in clusters
In contemporary policy discourses, data are presented as key assets for improving health-care quality: policymakers want health care to become 'data driven'. In this article, we focus on a particular example of this ambition, namely a new Danish national quality development program for general practitioners (GPs) where doctors are placed in so-called 'clusters'. In these clusters, GPs are obliged to assess their own and colleagues' clinical quali…
The practical ethics of repurposing health data: How to acknowledge invisible data work and the need for prioritization
Throughout the Global North, policymakers invest in large-scale integration of health-data infrastructures to facilitate the reuse of clinical data for administration, research, and innovation. Debates about the ethical implications of data repurposing have focused extensively on issues of patient autonomy and privacy. We suggest that it is time to scrutinize also how the everyday work of healthcare staff is affected by political ambitions of dat…
The European health data space: Too big to succeed
Data Paradoxes: The Politics of Intensified Data Sourcing in Contemporary Healthcare
Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing. In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients,…
The life and death of confidentiality: A historical analysis of the flows of patient information
Health data can contain sensitive information. People who consult a doctor seek help on issues that matter to them: they typically expect some form of confidentiality. However, the notion and practices of confidentiality have changed dramatically over time. In this article, we trace the history of confidentiality in the Danish healthcare system, which has one of the world’s most integrated patient information infrastructures. Building on an analy…
Data as symptom: Doctors’ responses to patient-provided data in general practice
People are increasingly able to generate their own health data through new technologies such as wearables and online symptom checkers. However, generating data is one thing, interpreting them another. General practitioners (GPs) are likely to be the first to help with interpretations. Policymakers in the European Union are investing heavily in infrastructures to provide GPs access to patient measurements. But there may be a disconnect between pol…
A Data-Political Spectacle: How Covid-19 Became A Source of Societal Division in Denmark
Interviewsamtale: Medicinsk Antropologi
Interviewsamtale om medicinsk antropologi
Knowing, Unknowing, and Re-knowing: Introduction
Most technologies are knowledge-intensive, and contemporary knowledge production is often technology-intensive. Hence, knowledge practices are a central theme for a handbook for the anthropology of technology. Knowledge about knowing has mostly been considered a branch of philosophy or alternatively of theology. In this section we argue that the study of knowledge practices is part of both the foundation of the anthropological discipline and its …
Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
Data authority: Public debate about personalized medicine in Denmark
Personalized medicine has generated massive investments in data integration initiatives and stimulated new flows of health data among multiple actors. Such flows raise questions as to who should be able to access data, for which purposes, and how this access and use should be regulated. We suggest thinking of these questions as matters of ‘data authority’: who can legitimately do what with health data? In this article, we analyze a public debate …
The Unique and the Universal: Analyzing the Interplay Between Regulatory Frameworks, Researchers and Research Participants in Data Making
Contemporary health research is becoming increasingly data intensive with a dependency on more data, of different types, and on more people. Multiple measures are therefore taken to ensure a variety of data, for example by re-appropriating data collected for purposes other than research. In genetic research, there is a general aim of more personalized diagnostics and treatments. Personalization in many ways depends on access to a universal data p…
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised aroun…
Plastic diagnostics: The remaking of disease and evidence in personalized medicine
Politically authorized reports on personalized and precision medicine stress an urgent need for finer-grained disease categories and faster taxonomic revision, through integration of genomic and phenotypic data. Developing a data-driven taxonomy is, however, not as simple as it sounds. It is often assumed that an integrated data infrastructure is relatively easy to implement in countries that already have highly centralized and digitalized health…
Subject in the Making: Technologies of the Self and Aspirations for a Good Life in Contemporary Denmark
Coping with crisis is fundamental for human life, but so is the pursuit of everything good and fruitful. We revisit Foucault's technologies of the self as an analytical lens for what people do when pursuing a good life in contemporary Denmark. Comparing three emerging self-improvement domains; psychedelic micro-dosing, meditation and mindfulness, and fitness self-tracking, we explore processes though which individuals become subjects of their own…
Data promiscuity: How the public–private distinction shaped digital data infrastructures and notions of privacy
This essay discusses the performative effects of the public–private distinction on digital data infrastructures in healthcare. The words ‘public’ and ‘private’ hold many meanings. This analysis focuses on how they are used both in an informational sense (what is kept secret or strictly controlled versus what is out in the open or shared) and an institutional sense (issues of ownership and purpose such as being state-owned and governed for the com…
The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine: An Introduction to Supplement 7
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the p…
Data as promise: Reconfiguring Danish public health through personalized medicine
Personalized medicine' might sound like the very antithesis of population science and public health, with the individual taking the place of the population. However, in practice, personalized medicine generates heavy investments in the population sciences - particularly in data-sourcing initiatives. Intensified data sourcing implies new roles and responsibilities for patients and health professionals, who become responsible not only for data cont…
Conflicting notions of research ethics
Informed Consent: The Politics of Intent and Practice in Medical Research Ethics
Informed consent is a key feature of risk management in medical research. This review outlines the history of the consent requirement and describes its diverse forms through a review of anthropological studies of consent practices. We make a distinction between the politics of intent and the politics of practice to show how the consent requirement has become entrenched in practices through insistence on particular morally sanctioned intentions re…
Datafication and accountability in public health: Introduction to a special issue
In recent years and across many nations, public health has become subject to forms of governance that are said to be aimed at establishing accountability. In this introduction to a special issue, From Person to Population and Back: Exploring Accountability in Public Health , we suggest opening up accountability assemblages by asking a series of ostensibly simple questions that inevitably yield complicated answers: What is counted? What counts? An…
Science is really needed—that’s all I know: Informed consent and the non-verbal practices of collecting blood for genetic research in northern Sweden
In Vasterbotten County in northern Sweden a start-up biotech company has recently gained all commercial rights to one of the worlds largest population based research biobanks. The biobank and the company have publicly emphasized that all donors have given their informed consent to participate, but within the academy it has become debated whether people have been adequately informed. Based on anthropological fieldwork it is shown that many people …
Meaningless work: How the datafication of health reconfigures knowledge about work and erodes professional judgement
How do digital tools for datafication interact with contemporary ideas about what counts as knowledge about work? Based on a study of the thoroughly digitalized and data-intensive Danish healthcare sector, we argue that as digital datafication creates new forms of inspection and control, it also reconfigures perceptions of work throughout the healthcare system, and thereby potentially erodes goal orientation and the room for professional judgemen…
The Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised aroun…
Plastic diagnostics: The remaking of disease and evidence in personalized medicine
Politically authorized reports on personalized and precision medicine stress an urgent need for finer-grained disease categories and faster taxonomic revision, through integration of genomic and phenotypic data. Developing a data-driven taxonomy is, however, not as simple as it sounds. It is often assumed that an integrated data infrastructure is relatively easy to implement in countries that already have highly centralized and digitalized health…
Person, Patent and Property: A Critique of the Commodification Hypothesis
Studying Ethics as Policy: The Naming and Framing of Moral Problems in Genetic Research
This article reports on a study of an ethics policy developed by a startup genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a populationbased biobank in northern Sweden. Work in the anthropology of policy has been used as inspiration to study throughto identify how the policy took shape, to follow it through to the networks in which it took on social life, and finally to probe its social implications, in particular among the people…
Ethics Policies and Ethics Work in Cross-national Genetic Research and Data Sharing: Flows, Nonflows, and Overflows
In recent years, cross-national collaboration in medical research has gained increased policy attention. Policies are developed to enhance data sharing, ensure open-access, and harmonize international standards and ethics rules in order to promote access to existing resources and increase scientific output. In tandem with this promotion of data sharing, numerous ethics policies are developed to control data flows and protect privacy and confident…
Transplantation as an abstract good: Practising deliberate ignorance in deceased organ donation in Denmark
This article investigates valuations of organ transfers that are currently seen as legitimising increasingly aggressive procurement methods in Denmark. Based on interviews with registered donors and the intensive care unit staff responsible for managing organ donor patients we identify three types of valuation: the needs of recipients, respect for donors' autonomy and support of donors' relatives in their grieving process. Sometimes these modes o…
An anthropological analysis of European Union (EU) health governance as biopolitics: The case of the EU tissues and cells directive
Dangers of the digital fit: Rethinking seamlessness and social sustainability in data-intensive healthcare
For years, attempts at ensuring the social sustainability of digital solutions have focused on ensuring that they are perceived as helpful and easy to use. A smooth and seamless work experience has been the goal to strive for. Based on document analysis and interviews with 15 stakeholders, we trace the setting up of a data infrastructure in Danish General Practice that had achieved just this goal - only to end in a scandal and subsequent loss of …
The Role of Ethics in Commercial Genetic Research: Notes on the Notion of Commodification
The emergence of exchange systems for new bodily entities such as organs, cell lines, and tissue samples has generated increasing ethical concern. Concurrently, the role of ethics is becoming contested. Some social scientists have sought to reveal ethics policies as veils for commercial exploitation, masking the crude commodification of the human body. Other social scientists and ethicists have attempted to carve out a role for ethics as a defens…
The power of ethics: A case study from Sweden on the social life of moral concerns in policy processes
In this paper I report on an ethnographic study of an ethics policy developed by a start-up genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a population-based biobank in the town of Umeå in northern Sweden. Tracing the interdependencies between power and morality, my research compares moral reflections and stances among 1) policymakers, 2) health professionals and 3) donors, in relation to the issues identified in the policy. Thes…
Health in data space: Formative and experiential dimensions of cross-border health data sharing
Healthcare is increasingly datafied, and a wide range of actors-patients, clinicians, administrators, policymakers, and industry lobbyists-want to be able to exchange and access health data internationally and use them for an increasing number of purposes. Therefore, competing initiatives aimed at fostering international data integration proliferate, with the proposed European Health Data Space as one of the most prominent examples. But how do le…
Transgressive ethics: Professional work ethics as a perspective on ‘aggressive organ harvesting’
Occasionally brain-dead organ donors go into cardiac arrest before reaching the operating theater. In such cases, the needed resuscitation of the potential donor stimulates a range of concerns among the responsible staff. If the intensive care unit staff are going to carry out the organ retrieval, they must rush in with demanding treatment measures such as defibrillation shock and cardiac massage that may break breast bones and make the donor vom…
Ethics wars”: Reflections on the Antagonism between Bioethicists and Social Science Observers of Biomedicine1
After Novelty: The Mundane Practices of Ensuring a Safe and Stable Supply of Bone
New medical technologies to a great extent use material from human bodies as therapeutic tools. Social science studies of such ‘tools’ have tended to focus on technologies associated with novelty and drama. This paper, in contrast, concerns an old, well-entrenched and ostensibly undramatic technology, bone transfers, that has only recently gained public attention. The history of bone transplants is intertwined with a desire for a safe and stable …
A Data-Political Spectacle: How Covid-19 Became A Source of Societal Division in Denmark
Subject in the Making: Technologies of the Self and Aspirations for a Good Life in Contemporary Denmark
Coping with crisis is fundamental for human life, but so is the pursuit of everything good and fruitful. We revisit Foucault's technologies of the self as an analytical lens for what people do when pursuing a good life in contemporary Denmark. Comparing three emerging self-improvement domains; psychedelic micro-dosing, meditation and mindfulness, and fitness self-tracking, we explore processes though which individuals become subjects of their own…
Weak Data: The Social Biography of a Measurement Instrument and How It Failed to Ensure Accountability in Home Care
Contemporary health and social care is saturated by processes of datafication. In many cases, these processes are nested within an ostensibly simple logic of accountability: Define a politically and morally desirable goal, then measure the level of achievement. This logic has come to permeate public health initiatives globally and today it operates in most health care systems in various ways. We explore here a particular instantiation of the logi…
Tainted blood: Probing safety practices in the Danish blood system
The existing literature on donor screening in transfusion medicine tends to distinguish between social concerns about discrimination and medical concerns about safety. In this article, we argue that the bifurcation into social and medical concerns is problematic. We build our case on a qualitative study of the historical rise and current workings of safety practices in the Danish blood system. Here, we identify a strong focus on contamination in …
Science is really needed—that’s all I know: Informed consent and the non-verbal practices of collecting blood for genetic research in northern Sweden
In Vasterbotten County in northern Sweden a start-up biotech company has recently gained all commercial rights to one of the worlds largest population based research biobanks. The biobank and the company have publicly emphasized that all donors have given their informed consent to participate, but within the academy it has become debated whether people have been adequately informed. Based on anthropological fieldwork it is shown that many people …
The Emergence of an Entitlement Framework for Stored Tissue - Elements and Implications of an Escalating Conflict in Sweden
In 1999, a biotech company was established in Västerbotten County, in Sweden, and given what was termed ‘all commercial rights’ to a major research biobank containing blood samples of the majority of the adult population. It was predicted that the company would place the otherwise rather marginalised community at the centre of international life-science research. International investments failed to appear, however. During the spring of 2002, inte…
Is informed consent a solution to contractual problems? A comment on the article ‘“Iceland Inc.”: On the Ethics of Commercial Population Genomics’ by Jon F. Merz, Glenn E. McGee, and Pamela Sankar
Ethics was here’: Studying the language-games of ethics in the case of UK Biobank
Recent years have seen a proliferation in discourses on ethics, not least in relation to the establishment of large genetic databases, so-called biobanks. Through an analysis of UK Biobank and its so-called Ethics and Governance Framework, this paper suggests viewing the increased attention paid to ethics as part of a special mode of regulation created through what Wittgenstein called language-games. This article outlines selected aspects of this…
The Role of Ethics in Commercial Genetic Research: Notes on the Notion of Commodification
The emergence of exchange systems for new bodily entities such as organs, cell lines, and tissue samples has generated increasing ethical concern. Concurrently, the role of ethics is becoming contested. Some social scientists have sought to reveal ethics policies as veils for commercial exploitation, masking the crude commodification of the human body. Other social scientists and ethicists have attempted to carve out a role for ethics as a defens…
Conflicting notions of research ethics
Studying Ethics as Policy: The Naming and Framing of Moral Problems in Genetic Research
This article reports on a study of an ethics policy developed by a startup genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a populationbased biobank in northern Sweden. Work in the anthropology of policy has been used as inspiration to study throughto identify how the policy took shape, to follow it through to the networks in which it took on social life, and finally to probe its social implications, in particular among the people…
Ethics wars”: Reflections on the Antagonism between Bioethicists and Social Science Observers of Biomedicine1
The power of ethics: A case study from Sweden on the social life of moral concerns in policy processes
In this paper I report on an ethnographic study of an ethics policy developed by a start-up genomics company at the time it gained all commercial rights to a population-based biobank in the town of Umeå in northern Sweden. Tracing the interdependencies between power and morality, my research compares moral reflections and stances among 1) policymakers, 2) health professionals and 3) donors, in relation to the issues identified in the policy. Thes…
Person, Patent and Property: A Critique of the Commodification Hypothesis
Informed Consent: The Making of a Ubiquitous Rule in Medical Practice
During the past few decades the rule of informed consent has thoroughly changed everyday decision-making in the healthcare sector. This paper explores the dissemination of informed consent from the perspective of organizational fashion studies. It is argued that this approach can be employed to stimulate renewed reflections on what informed consent procedures do as well as when and how such procedures become endorsed by various organizational act…
Tradable Body Parts? How Bone and Recycled Prosthetic Devices Acquire a Price without Forming a ‘Market’
Embryonic Entitlements: Stem Cell Patenting and the Co-production of Commodities and Personhood
With the aim of understanding current problematizations of embryonic stem cell patenting this article rehearses the history of social entitlements related to reproductive material derived from women seeking care in institutions for reproductive health in Denmark. Our interest lies in the emergence of commercial exchange of material derived from embryos. Such exchange is characterized by contestation of the status of the embryo: is it a person or …
After Novelty: The Mundane Practices of Ensuring a Safe and Stable Supply of Bone
New medical technologies to a great extent use material from human bodies as therapeutic tools. Social science studies of such ‘tools’ have tended to focus on technologies associated with novelty and drama. This paper, in contrast, concerns an old, well-entrenched and ostensibly undramatic technology, bone transfers, that has only recently gained public attention. The history of bone transplants is intertwined with a desire for a safe and stable …
An anthropological analysis of European Union (EU) health governance as biopolitics: The case of the EU tissues and cells directive
Anthropologie des objets-frontières humains: Explorer de nouveaux sites pour la négociation de l’identité
L'anthropologie est définie comme l'étude de l'être humain (anthrôpos) ; mais où peut-on localiser le sujet de cette discipline ? Dans cet article, je propose d'explorer un type particulier d'entités que j'appelle les objets-frontières humains. Ces entités peuvent simultanément appartenir ou non au corps humain, relever de la personne et de la chose, du soi et du non-soi. La biomédecine actuelle repose en grande partie sur l'utilisation de tels o…
Transgressive ethics: Professional work ethics as a perspective on ‘aggressive organ harvesting’
Occasionally brain-dead organ donors go into cardiac arrest before reaching the operating theater. In such cases, the needed resuscitation of the potential donor stimulates a range of concerns among the responsible staff. If the intensive care unit staff are going to carry out the organ retrieval, they must rush in with demanding treatment measures such as defibrillation shock and cardiac massage that may break breast bones and make the donor vom…
The Anthropology of Potentiality in Biomedicine: An Introduction to Supplement 7
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, potentiality serves as a central concept in the life sciences and in medical practices. This special issue of Current Anthropology explores how genes, cells, bodies, and populations as well as technologies, disciplines, and research areas become imbued with potential. We suggest that anthropologists of the life sciences and biomedicine should work reflexively with the concept of potentiality and the p…
Beyond the ‘therapeutic misconception’: Research, care and moral friction
Informed Consent: The Politics of Intent and Practice in Medical Research Ethics
Informed consent is a key feature of risk management in medical research. This review outlines the history of the consent requirement and describes its diverse forms through a review of anthropological studies of consent practices. We make a distinction between the politics of intent and the politics of practice to show how the consent requirement has become entrenched in practices through insistence on particular morally sanctioned intentions re…
Biobanking: Ethical Issues
Regulatory Anatomy: How “Safety Logics” Structure European Transplant Medicine
This article proposes the term "safety logics" to understand attempts within the European Union (EU) to harmonize member state legislation to ensure a safe and stable supply of human biological material for transplants and transfusions. With safety logics, I refer to assemblages of discourses, legal documents, technological devices, organizational structures, and work practices aimed at minimizing risk. I use this term to reorient the analytical …
Tainted blood: Probing safety practices in the Danish blood system
The existing literature on donor screening in transfusion medicine tends to distinguish between social concerns about discrimination and medical concerns about safety. In this article, we argue that the bifurcation into social and medical concerns is problematic. We build our case on a qualitative study of the historical rise and current workings of safety practices in the Danish blood system. Here, we identify a strong focus on contamination in …
Transplantation as an abstract good: Practising deliberate ignorance in deceased organ donation in Denmark
This article investigates valuations of organ transfers that are currently seen as legitimising increasingly aggressive procurement methods in Denmark. Based on interviews with registered donors and the intensive care unit staff responsible for managing organ donor patients we identify three types of valuation: the needs of recipients, respect for donors' autonomy and support of donors' relatives in their grieving process. Sometimes these modes o…
Ordinary medicine. Extraordinary treatments, longer lives, and where to draw the line , by Sharon R Kaufman
Political science (42 works) · Sociology (36 works) · Law (33 works) · Computer Science (23 works) · Public relations (22 works) · Medicine (21 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Ethics in Clinical Research (20 works) · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation (15 works) · Law (15 works)