Nik Brown
Biographic Data
| ID | 3603793 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nik Brown |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nik |
| FAMILY NAME | Brown |
| SIGNATURE | BROWN N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4742-8595 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 42 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 262 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 42 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
Striving for Presence on a Hospital Ward
This article examines the phenomenology of nursing care delivered through Välkky, a full-body teleoperated humanoid robot trialed in a Finnish hospital ward in 2023. Bringing science and technology studies into dialogue with phenomenology, we analyze qualitative data from observations, focus groups, and interviews with nurse-operators, managers, roboticists, and one patient involved in the pilot. We argue that Välkky's deployment constituted a “r…
Välkky 's voyage on to a hospital ward
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Finland, we report on the trial of a teleoperated care robot named Välkky introduced onto a fully operational hospital neurological ward. Our data revealed a narrative arc where participants' early expectations of the hospital-based trial altered as the project unfolded. Greeted with techno-excitement and experimental enthusiasm about the place of robotics in reshaping roles within clinical care, Välkky became…
Towards a Sociology of Healthcare Robots
We propose a sociological approach to healthcare robots that emphasises the heterogeneous ethics of mutual labour and the complex definitions of care that emerge through robot design/deployment. This argument is the product of a narrative literature review that examined assistive robots deployed in care settings. We found that although the deployment of healthcare robots has redefined the concept of care, as featured in geography, legal studies, …
Engineering organs, hopes and hybridity
The development of replacing human organs with those from genetically modified pigs holds immense potential for alleviating the shortage of organs necessary for patients in need of transplants. This medical advancement is also accompanied by significant social changes, including the emergence of a bioeconomy, new modes of biotechnology governance, altered human-animal relations and increased public engagement. Some aspects, such as the impact on …
Assembling atmospheres, encountering care
This paper explores the design of hospital environments, in order to investigate how issues of infection control, spatial layout, and embodied practices intersect in the accomplishment of ‘care-ful’ geographies. Specifically, we trace how the material environments of three UK cystic fibrosis (CF) clinics are assembled in order to orchestrate routines that minimise the risk of cross-infection between patients and safeguard their wellbeing. Our ana…
The coughing body
With newfound relevance in the context of Covid-19, we focus on the coughing body, building on an in-depth qualitative study of three UK lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. Conceptually we take our cue from Norbert Elias and the way something as physiologically fundamental as coughing becomes the focus of etiquette and technique, touching also on themes central to Mary Douglas’ anthropology of pollution. This is explored …
Pathways, practices and architectures
Antimicrobial resistance and the adaptation of microbial life to antibiotics are recognised as a major healthcare challenge. Whereas most social science engagement with antimicrobial resistance has focussed on aspects of 'behaviour' (prescribing, antibiotic usage, patient 'compliance', etc.), this article instead explores antimicrobial resistance in the context of building design and healthcare architecture, focussing on the layout, design and ri…
Caring through distancing
Air care
With significant relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper contributes to emerging 'aerographic' research on the socio-materialities of air and breath, based on an in-depth empirical study of three hospital-based lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. We begin by outlining the changing place of atmosphere in hospital design from the pre-antibiotic period and into the present. We then turn to the first of three aerograph…
Immunitary Life
The introduction to Immunitary Life outlines the intellectual terrain in which immunity has been subject to humanities and social science critique. It begins with the politics and history of immunity found in the work of Emily Martin, Donna Haraway, Ed Cohen, Alfred Tauber and others. It then moves on to explore the contributions of continental philosophy. This primarily focuses on Roberto Esposito’s efforts to etymologically trace communitas, im…
Blood Ties and the Immunitary Bioeconomy
Blood is the classic context for an elaboration of the structural tensions between the market and the welfare state, the individual and the collective, the immunitary and the communitary. The giving of blood has become established as a measure of cohesive civility. And yet, blood has also become an index of societal fragility in the face of changing political and economic dynamics. This chapter explores more recent activity in the worlds of umbil…
Co/Immunity and the Biopolitics of Purity
The concluding chapter of the book takes its initial cue from the title of Mary Douglas’ eponymous classic Purity and Danger (1966). The chapter critically revisits Douglas’ insights to think about a potentially more integrated perspective on the dangers of purity. Douglas provides an initial framework for thinking about the socio-cultural and classificatory bases of pollution, risk and endangerment. The chapter looks back theoretically and empir…
Biotic Politics
This chapter explores these and other aspects of the recent politics of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) examining the dystopian capacity of infectious diseases to evolutionarily adapt to and ‘outpace’ the toxins and antibiotics developed to keep them at bay. The chapter explores AMR in terms of a potential shift from a hygienist to a potentially ‘post-hygienist’ politics, creating the space for a rethinking of infection, bugs, parasites and the mi…
Reconfiguring Species for Immunitary Hybridity
Like blood, transplantation is a singularly defining expression of the contemporary biopolitics of immunity. This chapter focuses on the contentious clinical and research domain of transpecies transplantation, or xenotransplantation. Where the previous chapter was primarily concerned with the biopolitics of immunitary circuits between humans, this discussion turns towards our changing biotechnological relationship to other species, other immunita…
Spherologies of Immunisation
Vaccination operates as yet another classic biopolitical dimension of contemporary immunitary life. In recent years, and in particular communities, thresholds of effective vaccination have fallen perilously below recent historic levels, leading to new infectious disease events and posing challenging questions for clinical bodies and government. However, the vaccination debate is only part of a wider picture in tensions between the community and t…
Immunitary Life
This book explores the growing intellectual interest in the politics of immunity. It empirically situates immunitary politics in real-world debates. This includes blood donation and evolving notions of embodied intimacy in the worlds of transplantation
Economic imaginaries of the Anti-biosis
This paper seeks to report on the way economic principles, formulae and discourse infiltrate biological research on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the life sciences. AMR, it can be argued, has become the basis for performing certain forms of 'economic imaginary'. Economic imaginaries are ways of projecting and materially restructuring economic and political orders through motifs, metaphors, images and practices. The paper contributes to critic…
Bugs in the blog
Contested Futures
In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenom…
There is worse to come
This paper reflects on the different futures and imaginaries constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We examine the role of catastrophism, trauma and notions of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR debate. The paper focuses on a number of imaginaries in the politics of AMR, particularly a characterisation of Britain as the ‘sick man of Europe’ or the ‘British disease’ and…
Cord blood banking – bio-objects on the borderlands between community and immunity
Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has become the focus of intense efforts to collect, screen and bank haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in hundreds of repositories around the world. UCB banking has developed through a broad spectrum of overlapping banking practices, sectors and institutional forms. Superficially at least, these sectors have been widely distinguished in bioethical and policy literature between notions of the 'public' and the 'private', th…
Metrics of hope
This article explores the emergence of a 'regime of hope' in the context of oncology care, practice and research. More specifically, my focus is the emergence, since the 1970s or so, of hope scales and indexes used to metricise the emotional states of cancer patients. These usually take the form of psychometric tests designed and deployed in order to subject affective life to calculative and rational scrutiny. This article locates this within the…
Contradictions of value
Umbilical cord blood (CB) has become established as an increasingly viable clinical alternative to bone marrow in the treatment of leukaemia leading to the construction of a global network of CB banks promoted through a moral ethos of gift. Additionally, some banks offer the opportunity to retain stem cells privately. CB is discursively presented as clinical 'waste', a 'by-product' of birthing. In this way CB units are made available to a global …
‘Reflex regulation’
With reference to two comparative UK biotechnology case studies, spanning recent decades, this article outlines the main features of what might usefully be expressed as ‘reflex regulation’. This includes a set of reactive institutional habits, routines and reflexes that continue to characterise the regulation of the biosciences in the UK. Methodologically, the article draws on long-term social scientific engagement with policy-making in the field…
Nativitas
This paper explores the way in which national sovereignty is defined and constituted through the production of indigenous genetic resources and biovalue. Our central argument is that the commodification of vital matter is mediated through what we call processes of “nativitization.” Nativitization occurs at the intersections of nationhood and nature, particularly through national endeavors to define native biowealth, a process which is constitutio…
Capitalizing hope
The creation of commercial cord blood banks rests on the promise of stem cell based regenerative medicine and marks the capitalization of human tissues within a future-oriented "regime of hope". This paper will present data from a survey of the international cord blood banking industry and will explore: (a) the way firms seek to commercialize cord blood as a new set of commodities; (b) the expectations and moral economy that are being constructed…
From Bedside to Bench? Communities of Promise, Translational Research and the Making of Blood Stem Cells
Contemporary science and technology policy is concerned with improving the diffusion of knowledge from basic science into the clinic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging field of Regenerative Medicine. In this paper we critically explore the changing relationships between the bench and the bedside through the development of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). In the history of HSCs over a 50-year period, the relationship between basi…
Shifting Tenses
Immunitary bioeconomy
The Promissory Pasts of Blood Stem Cells
Immunitary Life
This book explores the growing intellectual interest in the politics of immunity. It empirically situates immunitary politics in real-world debates. This includes blood donation and evolving notions of embodied intimacy in the worlds of transplantation
Contradictions of value
Umbilical cord blood (CB) has become established as an increasingly viable clinical alternative to bone marrow in the treatment of leukaemia leading to the construction of a global network of CB banks promoted through a moral ethos of gift. Additionally, some banks offer the opportunity to retain stem cells privately. CB is discursively presented as clinical 'waste', a 'by-product' of birthing. In this way CB units are made available to a global …
Metrics of hope
This article explores the emergence of a 'regime of hope' in the context of oncology care, practice and research. More specifically, my focus is the emergence, since the 1970s or so, of hope scales and indexes used to metricise the emotional states of cancer patients. These usually take the form of psychometric tests designed and deployed in order to subject affective life to calculative and rational scrutiny. This article locates this within the…
Xenotransplantation
There is worse to come
This paper reflects on the different futures and imaginaries constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We examine the role of catastrophism, trauma and notions of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR debate. The paper focuses on a number of imaginaries in the politics of AMR, particularly a characterisation of Britain as the ‘sick man of Europe’ or the ‘British disease’ and…
Bugs in the blog
Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation
This article discusses xenotransplantation (XTP: the surgical use of nonhuman tissues, organs, and cells for human transplantation) and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to "harvest" transplant tissues in the future. The authors' analysis shows that …
Air care
With significant relevance to the Covid-19 pandemic, this paper contributes to emerging 'aerographic' research on the socio-materialities of air and breath, based on an in-depth empirical study of three hospital-based lung infection clinics treating people with cystic fibrosis. We begin by outlining the changing place of atmosphere in hospital design from the pre-antibiotic period and into the present. We then turn to the first of three aerograph…
Contested Futures
In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenom…
Scientific citizenships
It has now become commonplace to extol the virtues of closer relations between science and society. In an age in which scientific decision-making is characterized by chronic uncertainty, and scient
Economic imaginaries of the Anti-biosis
This paper seeks to report on the way economic principles, formulae and discourse infiltrate biological research on antimicrobial resistance (AMR) in the life sciences. AMR, it can be argued, has become the basis for performing certain forms of 'economic imaginary'. Economic imaginaries are ways of projecting and materially restructuring economic and political orders through motifs, metaphors, images and practices. The paper contributes to critic…
Regulating Hybrids
Pathways, practices and architectures
Antimicrobial resistance and the adaptation of microbial life to antibiotics are recognised as a major healthcare challenge. Whereas most social science engagement with antimicrobial resistance has focussed on aspects of 'behaviour' (prescribing, antibiotic usage, patient 'compliance', etc.), this article instead explores antimicrobial resistance in the context of building design and healthcare architecture, focussing on the layout, design and ri…
Debates in xenotransplantation
This paper addresses disputes in the transplantation of tissues from transgenic animals to humans (XTP) between a number of biotech firms and several UK-based animal advocacy groups. Debates centre on the management of human and non-human identity, the indeterminacies of therapeutic efficacy and the risks of trans- species disease. Both constituencies make use of moral/cultural and scientific repertoires to advance their arguments.Science and Tec…
Xenotransplantation
Putting the future in its place
Health care professionals today struggle to establish strategic directions for the future, in part because of the continuing uncertainties engendered by innovations in the diagnosis and treatment of disease. Emerging technologies such as genetics and information technology pose acute challenges for healthcare professionals in respect to questions of service provision, organizational change and the meaning of health and illness. This paper contras…
Emerging Bioinformatic Networks
This paper explores the complexity of public/private identities in the emerging global economies of gene sequence mapping and analysis. In so doing we seek to offer a less over-determined acccount of what it means to describe institutional actors as either 'public' or 'private'. Instead, these 'codes' can be seen to offer actors a means of mutual positioning that, more usually conceals broader interdependencies within the world's bioinformatics n…
Switching between Science and Culture in Transpecies Transplantation
This article discusses xenotransplantation (XTP: the surgical use of nonhuman tissues, organs, and cells for human transplantation) and examines the way its scientific promoters have defended their technology against potentially damaging public representations. The authors explore the criteria used to legitimate the selection of the pig as the best species from which to "harvest" transplant tissues in the future. The authors' analysis shows that …
From authority to authenticity
In this paper, we suggest that the basis on which risk is publicly managed is presently in a process of transition from the demonstration of expert authority to that of public authenticity. That is, in today's contexts of contested trust, the achievement of an authentic persona has become an increasingly important representational objective for both institutions and individuals involved in risk management. The paper draws empirically on a recent …
The meat of the matter
This paper is concerned with the ways in which lay people come to understand and assess xenotransplantation. Drawing on focus group data, we explore how people can both demonstrate a collective process of cost–benefit thinking and tacitly problematize this by deploying three meta-arguments that we call “trust,” “telos,” and “trump.” Respectively, these meta-arguments emphasize: unexamined relations of trust; irrelevance because innovations such a…
Scientific citizenships
It has now become commonplace to extol the virtues of closer relations between science and society. In an age in which scientific decision-making is characterized by chronic uncertainty, and scient
Shifting Tenses
The Promissory Pasts of Blood Stem Cells
Regulating Hybrids
From Bedside to Bench? Communities of Promise, Translational Research and the Making of Blood Stem Cells
Contemporary science and technology policy is concerned with improving the diffusion of knowledge from basic science into the clinic. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the emerging field of Regenerative Medicine. In this paper we critically explore the changing relationships between the bench and the bedside through the development of haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs). In the history of HSCs over a 50-year period, the relationship between basi…
Capitalizing hope
The creation of commercial cord blood banks rests on the promise of stem cell based regenerative medicine and marks the capitalization of human tissues within a future-oriented "regime of hope". This paper will present data from a survey of the international cord blood banking industry and will explore: (a) the way firms seek to commercialize cord blood as a new set of commodities; (b) the expectations and moral economy that are being constructed…
New Medical Technologies and Society. Reordering Life
Beasting the Embryo
Nativitas
This paper explores the way in which national sovereignty is defined and constituted through the production of indigenous genetic resources and biovalue. Our central argument is that the commodification of vital matter is mediated through what we call processes of “nativitization.” Nativitization occurs at the intersections of nationhood and nature, particularly through national endeavors to define native biowealth, a process which is constitutio…
The textures of globalization
In this paper, we explore the tensions around a recent controversial development in medical tourism: xenotourism in Mexico. We take this bioendeavor – now ceased – to be emblematic of the global character of contemporary biomedicine, providing insights into the production and operation of scientific knowledge. We explore this through what we call the “textures of globalization”: the anxiety regarding the extent to which Mexico was understood as a…
Immunitary bioeconomy
‘Reflex regulation’
With reference to two comparative UK biotechnology case studies, spanning recent decades, this article outlines the main features of what might usefully be expressed as ‘reflex regulation’. This includes a set of reactive institutional habits, routines and reflexes that continue to characterise the regulation of the biosciences in the UK. Methodologically, the article draws on long-term social scientific engagement with policy-making in the field…
Contradictions of value
Umbilical cord blood (CB) has become established as an increasingly viable clinical alternative to bone marrow in the treatment of leukaemia leading to the construction of a global network of CB banks promoted through a moral ethos of gift. Additionally, some banks offer the opportunity to retain stem cells privately. CB is discursively presented as clinical 'waste', a 'by-product' of birthing. In this way CB units are made available to a global …
Cord blood banking – bio-objects on the borderlands between community and immunity
Umbilical cord blood (UCB) has become the focus of intense efforts to collect, screen and bank haematopoietic stem cells (HSCs) in hundreds of repositories around the world. UCB banking has developed through a broad spectrum of overlapping banking practices, sectors and institutional forms. Superficially at least, these sectors have been widely distinguished in bioethical and policy literature between notions of the 'public' and the 'private', th…
Metrics of hope
This article explores the emergence of a 'regime of hope' in the context of oncology care, practice and research. More specifically, my focus is the emergence, since the 1970s or so, of hope scales and indexes used to metricise the emotional states of cancer patients. These usually take the form of psychometric tests designed and deployed in order to subject affective life to calculative and rational scrutiny. This article locates this within the…
Bugs in the blog
Contested Futures
In a unique volume, Contested Futures brings together a group of scholars to examine the relationships between social action and the future. Rather than speculating upon what the future might bring, the volume interrogates the metaphors and practices through which the future is mobilized as an object of present day action and agency. The book shifts the analytical gaze from looking into the future to looking at the future as a sociological phenom…
There is worse to come
This paper reflects on the different futures and imaginaries constructed through the politics and policy of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). We examine the role of catastrophism, trauma and notions of ‘resistance’ expressed at different moments in the development of the AMR debate. The paper focuses on a number of imaginaries in the politics of AMR, particularly a characterisation of Britain as the ‘sick man of Europe’ or the ‘British disease’ and…
Political science (28 works) · Sociology (28 works) · Law (17 works) · Medicine (17 works) · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations (15 works) · Environmental ethics (14 works) · Epistemology (14 works) · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation (12 works) · Politics (12 works) · Biology (10 works)