Ayo Wahlberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 81108 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Ayo Wahlberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Ayo |
| FAMILY NAME | Wahlberg |
| SIGNATURE | WAHLBERG A |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Copenhagen |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6862-5208 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 246 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 48 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Modes of Speculation
This is the afterword to the Special Issue "Interrogating Speculative Futures: The Politics of Imagining Futures with(out) Chronic Illness."
Our thanks to founding editor Professor Nikolas Rose
Interembodiment among Long Haulers and their carers
Mao’s Bestiary
Calibrating logics
Adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes must manage a demanding chronic condition in their daily lives, but adequate self-management remains a major challenge. In this article, we explore the logics invoked in shaping daily type 1 diabetes self-management among adolescents and young adults and propose an analytical view of self-management as a matter of 'calibrating logics'. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's concept of logic, our analysis of i…
More than sample providers
While unequally resourced partners from the so-called global South are often considered ‘mere sample providers’ in larger international genomics collaborations, in this paper, we show how they strategically work to mobilize their role in a global system of tissue exchange to deliver services for local communities. We unpack how a prenatal diagnostic service for thalassemia in Pakistan emerged out of the maneuvering efforts of internationally conn…
Infrastructures, Linkages, and Livelihoods
Palgrave Handbook of the Anthropology of Technology
The Anthropology of Technology
Assemblage Ethnography
Surveillance life and the shaping of ‘genetically at risk’ chronicities in Denmark
Today, in the field of hereditary colorectal cancer in Denmark, more than 40,000 identified healthy individuals with an increased risk of cancer are enrolled in a surveillance program aimed at preventing cancer from developing, with numbers still growing. What this group of healthy individuals has in common is lifelong regular interaction with a healthcare system that has traditionally been geared towards treating the acutely and chronically ill.…
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…
The Colonial Life of Pharmaceuticals
Viral Loads
Drawing upon the empirical scholarship and research expertise of contributors from all settled continents and from diverse life settings and economies, Viral Loads illustrates how the COVID-19 pandemic, and responses to it, lay bare and load onto people’s lived realities in countries around the world. A crosscutting theme pertains to how social unevenness and gross economic disparities are shaping global and local responses to the pandemic, and i…
The platforming of human embryo editing
In November 2018, a scientific scandal broke when news emerged that the world’s first gene edited babies had been born in China on the eve of the 2nd International Summit on Human Genome Editing in Hong Kong. He Jiankui had recruited a total of seven couples who were in need of fertility treatment to participate in an effort to clinically apply human embryo editing with the promise that, if successful, their future children would be protected fro…
Lockdown texts
Chronic Paradoxes
There have been substantial advances in the diagnostics and treatment of congenital heart defects (CHDs) in recent decades, and this has improved survival significantly. Consequently, there is a growing interest in how CHDs affect the daily lives of children and youth. We examine life with CHDs as a particular kind of living from the perspectives of both children and youth with CHDs and their families through a systematic review of existing quali…
Chronic Living in a Communicable World
By April 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns had restricted the movements of over half the world's population. As health authorities advise people living with chronic conditions to self-isolate because they are at particular risk of serious complications and death, the epidemiological split between communicable and noncommunicable disease is tenuous. We argue that much more is at stake for people living with (multiple) medical conditions than being "at risk…
Traveling health-promoting infrastructures
In recent years, it has become increasingly important to understand the global circulation of healthcare innovations in nations' attempts to solve contemporary health challenges. This article is a systematic review and meta-ethnography-inspired analysis that explores the global circulation of health-related standards, protocols, procedures, and regulations, or what we term health-promoting infrastructures (HPIs). The notion of HPIs is defined as …
Good Quality
From crude and uneasy beginnings, sperm banking has become a routine part of China’s pervasive and restrictive reproductive complex within the space of thirty years. It covers the introduction of assisted reproductive technologies (ARTs) to China to address infertility, the expansion of the use of donor sperm in cases in which the male partner suffers from a genetic disease, and other issues, such as the availability and screening of potential sp…
Exposed Biologies and the Banking of Reproductive Vitality in China
The looming figures of smog-choked cities, cancer villages and contaminated food have become iconic of a modernising China: the tragic, perhaps unavoidable, side effects of a voracious economy. In this article, I examine how the sperm bank—jingzi ku—in China has emerged quite literally as a sanctuary of vitality amidst concerns around food safety, air and water pollution, rising infertility and declining population quality. As a twist on Margaret…
Global imaginations
Online Peer-to-Peer Communities in the Daily Lives of People With Chronic Illness
This qualitative systematic review investigated how individuals with chronic illness experience online peer-to-peer support and how their experiences influence daily life with illness. Selected studies were appraised by quality criteria focused upon research questions and study design, participant selection, methods of data collection, and methods of analysis. Four themes were identified: (a) illness-associated identity work, (b) social support a…
The birth and routinization of IVF in China
How can it be that China, with its history of restrictive family planning policies, is today home to some of the world's largest IVF clinics, carrying out as many as 30,000 cycles annually?This article addresses how IVF was developed in China during the early 1980s, becoming routinized at the same time as one of the world's most comprehensive family planning programmes aimed at preventing birth was being rolled out.IVF was not merely imported int…
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
The governmentalization of living
The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge ‘the state of world health’. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compilation and tabulation of vital statistics – death-rates, birth-rates, morbidity rates – contributed t…
Selective Reproductive Technologies
From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective f…
Online Peer-to-Peer Communities in the Daily Lives of People With Chronic Illness
This qualitative systematic review investigated how individuals with chronic illness experience online peer-to-peer support and how their experiences influence daily life with illness. Selected studies were appraised by quality criteria focused upon research questions and study design, participant selection, methods of data collection, and methods of analysis. Four themes were identified: (a) illness-associated identity work, (b) social support a…
Chronic Living in a Communicable World
By April 2020, COVID-19 lockdowns had restricted the movements of over half the world's population. As health authorities advise people living with chronic conditions to self-isolate because they are at particular risk of serious complications and death, the epidemiological split between communicable and noncommunicable disease is tenuous. We argue that much more is at stake for people living with (multiple) medical conditions than being "at risk…
A quackery with a difference-New medical pluralism and the problem of 'dangerous practitioners' in the United Kingdom
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
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…
Above and beyond superstition — western herbal medicine and the decriminalizing of placebo
Does it work? This question lies at the very heart of the kinds of controversies that have surrounded complementary and alternative medicines (such as herbal medicine) in recent decades. In this article, I argue that medical anthropology has played a pivotal and largely overlooked role in taking the sham out of the placebo effect with important implications for what it means to say a therapy or drug `works'. If pharmacologists and clinicians have…
From global bioethics to ethical governance of biomedical research collaborations
Situated bio-regulation
The birth and routinization of IVF in China
How can it be that China, with its history of restrictive family planning policies, is today home to some of the world's largest IVF clinics, carrying out as many as 30,000 cycles annually?This article addresses how IVF was developed in China during the early 1980s, becoming routinized at the same time as one of the world's most comprehensive family planning programmes aimed at preventing birth was being rolled out.IVF was not merely imported int…
Bio-politics and the promotion of traditional herbal medicine in Vietnam
It is often suggested that, in the past 50 years, Vietnam has experienced a traditional medicine 'revival' that can be traced back to late President Ho Chi Minh's 1955 appeal 'to study means of uniting the effects of oriental remedies with those of Europe'. In this article, I demonstrate how traditional herbal medicine came to be recruited as an important component of national efforts to promote the public health of urban and rural populations in…
Governing Difference in India and China
The Problem of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Today
Commentators such as Goldacre, Dawkins, and Singh and Ernst are worried that the rise in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) represents a flight from science propagated by enemies of reason. We outline what kind of problem CAM use is for these commentators, and find that users of CAM have been constituted as duped, ignorant, irrational, or immoral in explaining CAM use. However, this form of problematization can be described as a flight …
Measuring Progress
In recent years, sociological examinations of genetics, therapeutic cloning, neuroscience and tissue engineering have suggested that ‘life itself’ is currently being transformed through technique with profound implications for the ways in which we understand and govern ourselves and others. In this paper, argue that a growing focus on frontier technologies in the life sciences in discussions about bio-power today has come at the cost of empirical…
Calibrating logics
Adolescents and young adults with type 1 diabetes must manage a demanding chronic condition in their daily lives, but adequate self-management remains a major challenge. In this article, we explore the logics invoked in shaping daily type 1 diabetes self-management among adolescents and young adults and propose an analytical view of self-management as a matter of 'calibrating logics'. Drawing on Annemarie Mol's concept of logic, our analysis of i…
Traveling health-promoting infrastructures
In recent years, it has become increasingly important to understand the global circulation of healthcare innovations in nations' attempts to solve contemporary health challenges. This article is a systematic review and meta-ethnography-inspired analysis that explores the global circulation of health-related standards, protocols, procedures, and regulations, or what we term health-promoting infrastructures (HPIs). The notion of HPIs is defined as …
Global imaginations
Drugs for life
China as an ‘Emerging Biotech Power’
Asia's dramatic entry on to the global biotech scene has not gone unnoticed by commentators and social scientists. Countries like China, India, South Korea and Singapore have been identified as ‘emerging biotech powers’. Consequently scholars have begun examining the particularities of how biotechnologies (eg stem cell science, genetic testing and reproductive medicine) have come to be taken up and grounded in a variety of cultural, legal and soc…
Drink water, but remember the source
Tracking Failing Biologies
Local Cells, Global Science: The Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India, by Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner, Routledge, 2009, 152 pp., £80.00. The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntingto
Marginal to Mainstream
Bio-politics and the promotion of traditional herbal medicine in Vietnam
It is often suggested that, in the past 50 years, Vietnam has experienced a traditional medicine 'revival' that can be traced back to late President Ho Chi Minh's 1955 appeal 'to study means of uniting the effects of oriental remedies with those of Europe'. In this article, I demonstrate how traditional herbal medicine came to be recruited as an important component of national efforts to promote the public health of urban and rural populations in…
An Elusive Evidence Base
Measuring Progress
In recent years, sociological examinations of genetics, therapeutic cloning, neuroscience and tissue engineering have suggested that ‘life itself’ is currently being transformed through technique with profound implications for the ways in which we understand and govern ourselves and others. In this paper, argue that a growing focus on frontier technologies in the life sciences in discussions about bio-power today has come at the cost of empirical…
A quackery with a difference-New medical pluralism and the problem of 'dangerous practitioners' in the United Kingdom
Pathways to Plausibility
Above and beyond superstition — western herbal medicine and the decriminalizing of placebo
Does it work? This question lies at the very heart of the kinds of controversies that have surrounded complementary and alternative medicines (such as herbal medicine) in recent decades. In this article, I argue that medical anthropology has played a pivotal and largely overlooked role in taking the sham out of the placebo effect with important implications for what it means to say a therapy or drug `works'. If pharmacologists and clinicians have…
Bodies and populations
Vietnam has been described by many commentators as being about two decades 'behind' many of its East Asian neighbours in terms of economic and social development, although a series of economic reforms initiated in 1986 under a banner of i mi (renovation) are credited with closing the gap. At the same time, as has been the case in many other socialist countries, science and technology in Vietnam have been seen as central forces for national develo…
Medical identities
Tracking Failing Biologies
Local Cells, Global Science: The Rise of Embryonic Stem Cell Research in India, by Aditya Bharadwaj and Peter Glasner, Routledge, 2009, 152 pp., £80.00. The Woman Who Walked into the Sea: Huntingto
The global health complex
Abortion in Asia
China as an ‘Emerging Biotech Power’
Asia's dramatic entry on to the global biotech scene has not gone unnoticed by commentators and social scientists. Countries like China, India, South Korea and Singapore have been identified as ‘emerging biotech powers’. Consequently scholars have begun examining the particularities of how biotechnologies (eg stem cell science, genetic testing and reproductive medicine) have come to be taken up and grounded in a variety of cultural, legal and soc…
Drink water, but remember the source
Governing Difference in India and China
Situated bio-regulation
From global bioethics to ethical governance of biomedical research collaborations
Eating Drugs
Herbs, Laboratories, and Revolution
This article examines the making of a national medicine in Vietnam. How can it be that the medical traditions in Vietnam came to be described as Vietnamese during the course of the twentieth century? In this article, I suggest that historical contingencies in Vietnam have facilitated what might be thought of as a “doctrine of combination,” somewhat in contrast to the institutionalized and contentious separation of, for example, Chinese and Korean…
Collaborators collaborating
The Problem of Complementary and Alternative Medicine Use Today
Commentators such as Goldacre, Dawkins, and Singh and Ernst are worried that the rise in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) represents a flight from science propagated by enemies of reason. We outline what kind of problem CAM use is for these commentators, and find that users of CAM have been constituted as duped, ignorant, irrational, or immoral in explaining CAM use. However, this form of problematization can be described as a flight …
Selective Reproductive Technologies
From a historical perspective, selective reproduction is nothing new. Infanticide, abandonment, and selective neglect of children have a long history, and the widespread deployment of sterilization and forced abortion in the twentieth century has been well documented. Yet in recent decades selective reproduction has been placed under the aegis of science and expertise in novel ways. New laboratory and clinical techniques allow for the selective f…
Drugs for life
The government of life
The concepts of governmentality and biopolitics were contemporaneous and interlinked in Michel Foucault's initial analyses. These foregrounded how in the eighteenth century the population emerged as a 'natural-cultural reality' resulting from an integration of biological and economic knowledge. Subsequent research on biopolitics and governmentality has tended to separate the concepts, differentiating into distinct research traditions each with di…
The governmentalization of living
The contemporary global health agenda has shifted emphasis from mapping disease patterns to calculating disease burden in efforts to gauge ‘the state of world health’. In this paper, we account for this shift by showing how a novel epidemiological style of thought emerged in the closing decades of the twentieth century. As is well known, the compilation and tabulation of vital statistics – death-rates, birth-rates, morbidity rates – contributed t…
Political science (24 works) · Sociology (20 works) · Law (19 works) · Medicine (17 works) · Biology (9 works) · History (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · China (7 works) · Economics (7 works)