Sahra Gibbons
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 775 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Sahra Gibbons |
| PRENOMES | Sahra |
| SOBRENOME | Gibbons |
| ASSINATURA | GIBBONS S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University College London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5185-9750 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 47 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 185 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 47 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2002 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
The Complex Dynamics of Healthism in Birth Cohort Studies
Longitudinal birth cohort studies are an under-examined context for considering the dynamics of healthism. This article presents a comparative perspective from the 'Biosocial Lives of Birth Cohorts' study, which takes birth cohorts as an ethnographic object of knowledge-making, social practice and participation in the Netherlands, Brazil, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Drawing from ethnographic research with participants and professionals invol…
What is innovative in qualitative methods in birth Cohort studies? A scoping review
Longitudinal birth cohort research provides a glimpse into the biological and social trajectories of a cohort of people, which helps us to better understand how to improve health and social outcomes. While qualitative longitudinal, ethnographic, and other qualitative research methods are increasingly used to capture complex data in trials and cohort research, they are relatively less common, and they vary greatly within and across cohorts and nat…
Nonetheless biosocial’
The relative expansion of biosocial research within the life sciences has generated substantial interest from social sciences, with epigenetic science and scientists the primary target of critical commentary. This has led to a narrow perspective on what the biosocial is and how it is being (re)constituted within scientific research, highlighting a need to engage diverse publics in this unfolding terrain of knowledge making. Whilst birth cohorts a…
Poner el cuerpo
Neste número de Horizontes Antropológicos propomos colocar o corpo no centro da cena complexa do que é, ou pode ser, fazer antropologia hoje. Quais as formas teóricas e metodológicas com que o corpo tem sido reelaborado uma e outra vez na antropologia brasileira? Como chegar no corpo a partir de teorias contra-hegemônicas, negras, indígenas, puta/transfeministas e, inclusive, contrateóricas, ou através de ontologias exógenas à moderna? Será que é…
Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene
Introduction to the special issue 'Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene', guest edited by Jennie Gamlin, Laura Montesi, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata, and Ceres Victora
Situating Latin American Critical Epidemiology in the Anthropocene
Diverse histories and traditions of critical epidemiology in Latin America provide an important, although underutilised, alternative framework for engaging with the embodied health inequalities of the Anthropocene. Taking COVID-19 as 'a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease' (O'Callaghan-Gordo and Antó 2020) and drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil and Mexico on vaccination campaigns among Indigenous Peoples, we review and analyse…
Consciously quarantined
Whilst quarantine has been experienced in a multitude of ways around the world, for some anthropologists the quietening of public movement was met with a flurry of attentive typing. For those who were consciously quarantined, a social science response to COVID-19 was sought at University College London through a call for posts as part of the UCL Medical Anthropology blog; capturing the real-time observations and scholarly reflections on the unfol…
Therapeutic Values in Cancer Care
Cancer is more than just a cluster of diseases.Beyond patho-physiological variations, it has been mobilized by experts and lay people to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena.The regional variability and socio-historical situatedness of experiences of cancer have been
Centring a critical medical anthropology of Covid-19 in global health discourse
The disciplines of biomedicine and global health have been at the epicentre of understanding and finding solutions to the current COVID-19 pandemic. We are thankful for the record-breaking speed of vaccine development, the meticulousness with which the virus is being tracked in order to identify and respond to new variants, developments in hospital care practices and treatments that have contributed to bringing down the case fatality rate and to …
La pandemia. Año 2
We have invited three specialists from the field of medical anthropology to reflect on their respective experiences and knowledge of Mexico, Great Britain, the United States and India, all of them countries deeply affected by the pandemic, even if in very different ways, and whose management of the pandemic has been oriented in different directions. This allows us to contrast the diversity of official responses to the health and economic crisis
Toward Intergenerational Ethnography
Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and…
The narrative paradox of the BRCA gene
In this era of personalisation a patient's molecular profile plays an increasingly central role in development and delivery of personalised medicine. This paper sets out to explore the sociocultural implications of mainstreaming BRCA genetic testing in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer patients, who carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation. It draws on ethnographic research conducted by between April-June 2016 in a large tertiary London hospit…
Critical Medical Anthropology
Critical Medical Anthropology presents inspiring work from scholars doing and engaging with ethnographic research in or from Latin America, addressing themes that are central to contemporary Critical Medical Anthropology (CMA). This includes issues of inequality, embodiment of history, indigeneity, non-communicable diseases, gendered violence, migration, substance abuse, reproductive politics and judicialisation, as these relate to health
Da busca pelo diagnóstico às incertezas do tratamento
As doenças genéticas raras constituem um importante problema de saúde pública, mas ainda são pouco estudadas na perspectiva da Saúde Coletiva. Este artigo tem por objetivo analisar os itinerários terapêuticos de pacientes com doenças genéticas raras nas cidades do Rio de Janeiro, Salvador e Porto Alegre, tendo por foco os desafios materiais, emocionais e estruturais enfrentados na busca por diagnóstico e tratamento. Foram realizadas entrevistas s…
Medicina da família, a "herança" e o câncer de mama
Com base nas pesquisas em ciências sociais que examinam a relação entre conhecimento genético, identidade e família, este artigo toma o contexto cultural de Cuba como um local de engajamento etnográfico crítico. O artigo é baseado em uma pesquisa que contou com a interlocução de mulheres cubanas e profissionais da genética como parte de pesquisa colaborativa que explora o contexto social e cultural das crenças em saúde sobre o câncer de mama. Bus…
Geneticization
The critique of geneticization was intended originally to raise critical questions about the consequences of genetic knowledge for concepts of health and identity. The diverse significance and scope of the concept has been explored by a range of anthropologists and extended by those interested in questions of health activism. An emerging understanding of genetic function and expression as predicated on environmental interactions raises new questi…
Inclusion and exclusion in the globalisation of genomics; the case of rare genetic disease in Brazil
Within the context of a globalising agenda for genetic research where 'global health' is increasingly seen as necessarily informed by and having to account for genomics, the focus on rare genetic diseases is becoming prominent. Drawing from ethnographic research carried out separately by both authors in Brazil, this paper examines how an emerging focus on two different arenas of rare genetic disease, cancer genetics and a class of degenerative ne…
Calibrating cancer risk, uncertainty and environments
Genomics and genetic medicine
This special issue of Anthropology and Medicine contributes to emerging anthropological research examining the expanding terrain of genomic research and genetic medicine as a product of and vector
Entangled local biologies
Engaging recent social science work examining the truth making claims of science and biomedicine, this paper explores how biology is being localised in Brazilian cancer genetics. It draws from ethnographic fieldwork in urban regions of southern Brazil working with and alongside patients, families and practitioners in cancer genetic clinics. It examines how different sorts of 'local biologies' are articulated in the context of research, clinical p…
Translating genomics
This article examines how cancer genetics has emerged as a focus for research and healthcare in Cuba and Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in community genetics clinics and cancer genetics services, the article examines how the knowledge and technologies associated with this novel area of healthcare are translated and put to work by researchers, health professionals, patients and their families in these two contexts. It illumina…
Translating Population Difference
In the past ten years, there has been an expansion of scientific interest in population genetics linked to both understanding histories of human migration and the way that population difference and diversity may account for and/or be implicated in health and disease. In this article, I examine how particular aspects of a globalizing research agenda related to population differences and genetic ancestry are taken up in locally variant ways in the …
Pharmacogenomics, human genetic diversity and the incorporation and rejection of color/race in Brazil
Public funding for research on the action of drugs in countries like the United States requires that racial classification of research subjects should be considered when defining the composition of the samples as well as in data analysis, sometimes resulting in interpretations that Whites and Blacks differ in their pharmacogenetic profiles. In Brazil, pharmacogenomic results have led to very different interpretations when compared with those obta…
Genetics and ethics in Latin America
Between personal and relational privacy
Drawing from perspectives of both bioethics and anthropology, this article explores how the boundaries between personal and relational privacy are negotiated by patients and practitioners in the context of an emerging domain of cancer genetics in Brazil. It reflects on the place of informed consent in the history of bioethics in North America in contrast to the development of bioethics in Brazil and the particular social cultural context in which…
Undone Science
Undone science'' refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politic…
Re-Examining Geneticization
Ancestry, Temporality, and Potentiality
In this paper I examine the variety of ways potential is articulated, entailed, and produced in how the field of cancer genetics is being constituted as a domain of transnational research and an emerging site of health-care intervention in southern Brazil. Drawing on analysis of fieldwork in Brazilian cancer-genetics clinics, I explore how different expressions of potential come to inform dynamically the pursuit of prevention, care, and research …
Genomics as public health? Community genetics and the challenge of personalised medicine in Cuba
Making use of a comparative perspective on the emergence of 'breast cancer genetics' in the different cultural context of the UK and Cuba, this article examines the tensions between the modern promise of genomics as personalised medicine and a commitment to public health. Focusing primarily on the Cuba context and drawing on ethnographic research as part of a collaborative project working with genetic professionals and publics, the article examin…
Family medicine, 'La Herencia' and breast cancer; understanding the (dis)continuities of predictive genetics in Cuba
Entangled local biologies
Engaging recent social science work examining the truth making claims of science and biomedicine, this paper explores how biology is being localised in Brazilian cancer genetics. It draws from ethnographic fieldwork in urban regions of southern Brazil working with and alongside patients, families and practitioners in cancer genetic clinics. It examines how different sorts of 'local biologies' are articulated in the context of research, clinical p…
Translating Population Difference
In the past ten years, there has been an expansion of scientific interest in population genetics linked to both understanding histories of human migration and the way that population difference and diversity may account for and/or be implicated in health and disease. In this article, I examine how particular aspects of a globalizing research agenda related to population differences and genetic ancestry are taken up in locally variant ways in the …
Therapeutic Values in Cancer Care
Cancer is more than just a cluster of diseases.Beyond patho-physiological variations, it has been mobilized by experts and lay people to make sense of a wide variety of phenomena.The regional variability and socio-historical situatedness of experiences of cancer have been
The narrative paradox of the BRCA gene
In this era of personalisation a patient's molecular profile plays an increasingly central role in development and delivery of personalised medicine. This paper sets out to explore the sociocultural implications of mainstreaming BRCA genetic testing in the treatment of advanced ovarian cancer patients, who carry a BRCA1 or BRCA2 gene mutation. It draws on ethnographic research conducted by between April-June 2016 in a large tertiary London hospit…
Nurturing Women and the BRCA Genes
This paper explores the relationship between breast cancer activism and a newly emergent arena of 'predictive' medicine, breast cancer genetics. Drawing on ethnographic research in UK cancer genetic clinics, it explores the way the goals and gendered values of a certain kind of breast cancer activism operate at the interface between patients and practitioners. It examines how the morality of health awareness and the value female nurturance are im…
Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene
Introduction to the special issue 'Embodied Inequalities of the Anthropocene', guest edited by Jennie Gamlin, Laura Montesi, Sahra Gibbon, Paola Sesia, Jean Segata, and Ceres Victora
Genomics and genetic medicine
This special issue of Anthropology and Medicine contributes to emerging anthropological research examining the expanding terrain of genomic research and genetic medicine as a product of and vector
Translating genomics
This article examines how cancer genetics has emerged as a focus for research and healthcare in Cuba and Brazil. Drawing on ethnographic research undertaken in community genetics clinics and cancer genetics services, the article examines how the knowledge and technologies associated with this novel area of healthcare are translated and put to work by researchers, health professionals, patients and their families in these two contexts. It illumina…
Toward Intergenerational Ethnography
Situated alongside and drawing from emerging inquiry, debate, and reflection about making and unmaking kin at a moment of critical reflection on racial, social, and reproductive inequities and changing environments, this special edition considers how anthropology can ethnographically examine and engage with intergenerational dynamics as they influence different scales and spheres of life. It brings together medical anthropologists and science and…
Science, Sentiment, and the State
Contributing to an emerging field of social science literature by examining the translation of genomic medicine across global and transnational fields of research and medicine, this article examines how genetics is allied to public health in Cuba. It examines the sociopolitical and cultural discourses and practices that constitute community genetics or challenge or impede the translation and expansion of genomics as public health. Focusing on the…
Special Edition for Anthropology and Medicine Biomedical Technology and Health Inequities in the Global North and South
Situating Latin American Critical Epidemiology in the Anthropocene
Diverse histories and traditions of critical epidemiology in Latin America provide an important, although underutilised, alternative framework for engaging with the embodied health inequalities of the Anthropocene. Taking COVID-19 as 'a paradigmatic example of an Anthropocene disease' (O'Callaghan-Gordo and Antó 2020) and drawing on ethnographic research in Brazil and Mexico on vaccination campaigns among Indigenous Peoples, we review and analyse…
Medicina da família, a "herança" e o câncer de mama
Com base nas pesquisas em ciências sociais que examinam a relação entre conhecimento genético, identidade e família, este artigo toma o contexto cultural de Cuba como um local de engajamento etnográfico crítico. O artigo é baseado em uma pesquisa que contou com a interlocução de mulheres cubanas e profissionais da genética como parte de pesquisa colaborativa que explora o contexto social e cultural das crenças em saúde sobre o câncer de mama. Bus…
Re-Examining Geneticization
Nurturing Women and the BRCA Genes
This paper explores the relationship between breast cancer activism and a newly emergent arena of 'predictive' medicine, breast cancer genetics. Drawing on ethnographic research in UK cancer genetic clinics, it explores the way the goals and gendered values of a certain kind of breast cancer activism operate at the interface between patients and practitioners. It examines how the morality of health awareness and the value female nurturance are im…
Diviners and Pastoral Keepers
The ubiquity of a ‘lay/professional’ distinction in much medical sociology and anthropology has often produced a somewhat reified analysis of the relationship between doctors and patients, contributing to a description and perception of medicine as unified or monolithic (Mol and Berg 1998). Although this distinction has been useful in highlighting how patients’ ‘experience’ of new technologies and knowledge is constituted within their ‘lifeworld’…
Constructing Patienthood
Continuing an examination of the kinds of collective work of patients and practitioners at the clinical interface, this chapter examines how ‘care’ is constituted in predictive medicine. It examines what care means for being a patient and how particular cultural values, long associated with female identity, are central and essential to the ‘pastoral’ practices of cancer genetics. It explores how managing the ongoing distance between diagnostic ca…
Technologies of the Clinic
The constituting and transformatory role of technology in the development of different clinical and medical specialties has been central to science studies (Casper and Koenig 1996; Mol and Berg 1998). This perspective stands in contrast to what has been a somewhat more reluctant approach within anthropology to examine the material practices of bio-medicine itself (Lock and Lindenbaum 1993). Drawing on recent work situated across these disciplinar…
Conclusion
The practices explored in this book suggest a diverse number of cultural arenas, encompassed by and which connect to breast cancer, offer a particularly potent ‘social form’ (Rabinow 1999: 89) for the development and legitimisation of new genetic knowledge. As Margaret Lock points out the emergence of predictive genetic testing for breast cancer is in many ways a striking case of the way that ‘possible probabilities, based on poorly constructed s…
The Alchemy of Loss and Hope
Recent expansion and developments in the bio-sciences have been accompanied by the growth of a diverse and fairly heterogeneous range of ‘patient organisations’, who increasingly have some sort of stake in the direction and outcome of different arenas of scientific or medical research (Epstein 1996, 2007; Brown et al. 2004). Such developments are also now reflected in the field of genetics (Rabeharisoa and Callon 1998; Rabinow 1999; Stockdale 199…
Scientists and the Making of Genomics as Monuments for the Living
Although the practice of scientists has been central to social studies of science, the experiences, identities and subject positions of scientists themselves has been the subject of far less attention. There has been a tendency, as Traweek notes, to focus on ‘agonistic encounters’ or present the ‘self’ only in terms of ‘autonomy and initiative’, with little sense or understanding of how scientists experience or identify with the worlds in which t…
The Enrolment of ‘Patients’
This book starts by considering a group of persons who have traditionally been situated at the centre of analysis in medical anthropology, where attending to the embodied or narrative experience of a patient’s illness normally takes centre stage (Good 1993). However, as Landzelius and Dumit point out, the figure of the patient is currently ‘undergoing an accelerated process of change’ (2006). Responding to their calls for further ‘scrutiny’ and ‘…
Between Geno-hype and the Post-Genomic
An organisation funded in the name of mothers, sisters and daughters and dedicated to fighting breast cancer by focusing on the microbiology of the breast, appears to powerfully align the witnessing of loss and the value of female nurturance with a hunt for, what is seen by many who support the charity, in terms of a ‘cure’ for breast cancer. This chapter moves beyond an exclusive focus on the particular character of this form of activism, to exa…
Breast Cancer Genes and the Gendering of Knowledge
The book examines the social and cultural context of new genetic knowledge associated with breast cancer. It looks at how this knowledge and technologies are used and received in two contrasting socia
Genomics as public health? Community genetics and the challenge of personalised medicine in Cuba
Making use of a comparative perspective on the emergence of 'breast cancer genetics' in the different cultural context of the UK and Cuba, this article examines the tensions between the modern promise of genomics as personalised medicine and a commitment to public health. Focusing primarily on the Cuba context and drawing on ethnographic research as part of a collaborative project working with genetic professionals and publics, the article examin…
Special Edition for Anthropology and Medicine Biomedical Technology and Health Inequities in the Global North and South
BRCA patients in Cuba, Greece and Germany
Special section
Undone Science
Undone science'' refers to areas of research that are left unfunded, incomplete, or generally ignored but that social movements or civil society organizations often identify as worthy of more research. This study mobilizes four recent studies to further elaborate the concept of undone science as it relates to the political construction of research agendas. Using these cases, we develop the argument that undone science is part of a broader politic…
Family medicine, 'La Herencia' and breast cancer; understanding the (dis)continuities of predictive genetics in Cuba
Identidades emergentes, genética e saúde
que também gerou, recentemente
Science, Sentiment, and the State
Contributing to an emerging field of social science literature by examining the translation of genomic medicine across global and transnational fields of research and medicine, this article examines how genetics is allied to public health in Cuba. It examines the sociopolitical and cultural discourses and practices that constitute community genetics or challenge or impede the translation and expansion of genomics as public health. Focusing on the…
Ancestry, Temporality, and Potentiality
In this paper I examine the variety of ways potential is articulated, entailed, and produced in how the field of cancer genetics is being constituted as a domain of transnational research and an emerging site of health-care intervention in southern Brazil. Drawing on analysis of fieldwork in Brazilian cancer-genetics clinics, I explore how different expressions of potential come to inform dynamically the pursuit of prevention, care, and research …
A genética do câncer de mama e a pluripotência do gênero
The so-called genetic revolution, developments in the life sciences and the rise of predictive medicine has stimulated social research not only to examine the novel forms of health and identity brought about at these junctures, but has also more recently involved efforts to examine how 'older' cultural categories of difference and identity such as race and ethnicity might be given new life by the development of new genetic knowledge and technolog…
Pharmacogenomics, human genetic diversity and the incorporation and rejection of color/race in Brazil
Public funding for research on the action of drugs in countries like the United States requires that racial classification of research subjects should be considered when defining the composition of the samples as well as in data analysis, sometimes resulting in interpretations that Whites and Blacks differ in their pharmacogenetic profiles. In Brazil, pharmacogenomic results have led to very different interpretations when compared with those obta…
Genetics and ethics in Latin America
Between personal and relational privacy
Drawing from perspectives of both bioethics and anthropology, this article explores how the boundaries between personal and relational privacy are negotiated by patients and practitioners in the context of an emerging domain of cancer genetics in Brazil. It reflects on the place of informed consent in the history of bioethics in North America in contrast to the development of bioethics in Brazil and the particular social cultural context in which…
Introduction - Health/Illness, Biosocialities and Culture
In this dossier, we present 10 articles exploring the theme of “Health/Illness, Biosocialities and Culture”. Addressed to a larger non-Portuguese speaking audience, our aim is to promote the research that has been developed by Brazilian Anthropologists from different generations, academic disciplines and university institutions on a variety of topics associated with this central theme. The articles presented here highlight the diverse ways that m…
Sociology (33 obras) · Race, Genetics, and Society (29 obras) · Political science (25 obras) · Medicine (21 obras) · Biology (16 obras) · Law (15 obras) · Social science (14 obras) · BRCA gene mutations in cancer (12 obras) · Anthropology (11 obras) · Cancer (11 obras)