N Stephens
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 47367 |
|---|---|
| NOME | N Stephens |
| PRENOMES | N |
| SOBRENOME | Stephens |
| ASSINATURA | STEPHENS N |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3871-0887 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 48 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 230 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 48 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2006 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 9 |
Offering Hyper-Local Community Health and Information Fairs through an Ontario Health Team to Provide Low-Barrier Access to Sexual Health Services
Through Community Health and Information Fairs (CHIFs) held in equity-deserving neighbourhoods in North York, Canada, health and social care partners provide low-barrier access to services and information, including for those who do not have health insurance or a primary care provider. Certain neighbourhoods disproportionately experience health inequities due to challenges such as low health system literacy, transportation difficulties, limited r…
Flemingdon Health Centre
Background: Low-income neighbourhoods with diverse health and social care needs are usually ignored by health planners and have poorer health experiences and outcomes. Fifty years ago, a community based primary health care team was formed to challenge this status quo. Flemingdon Health Centre (FHC) was created to provide accessible, comprehensive and coordinated care to a defined geography in Toronto, Canada. Over time, the organization became th…
Hyperlocal impact in the community| An Emerging model of Integrated Chronic Disease Prevention and Management
Background: North York, Toronto faces unique healthcare challenges, with 70% of its population identifying a primary language other than English. This language barrier, combined with an aging demographic and high prevalence of chronic conditions, limits access to healthcare and complicates system navigation. These challenges particularly affect the prevention and management of Congestive Heart Failure (CHF), Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease …
The Thorncliffe Park Pediatric Neighbourhood Initiative
Background: The Thorncliffe Park Pediatric Neighbourhood Initiative is an integrated, community-based care model addressing the complex health and social needs of children in Thorncliffe Park—a high-risk, diverse Toronto neighbourhood with a significant population of newcomer families. This initiative focuses on early intervention for developmental disorders, while also mitigating challenges such as poverty, language barriers, housing and food in…
Fighting fit
This paper explores the intersections of material culture and gendered identity among women in boxing, linking material objects to lived experience. Based on ethnographic field work in two Midlands based boxing gyms in the UK, the study used semi-structured interviews, field observations, and a novel method involving boxers’ kit bags. It examines how women athletes navigate, resist, and redefine dominant ideals of Western femininity–privileging h…
Elicitation using kit bag methods
In this paper, we present a novel qualitative research method that uses a boxer's kit bag and the items contained within, to explore the relationship that participants have with activity-specific material items. These immersive sensory encounters explore the participants' experiences of interacting with their kit and how their kit contributes to identity formation and their sense of belonging in the boxing gym. This method contributes to the fiel…
Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value
A recent philanthropic movement with advocates among high-profile tech entrepreneurs and philosophers, effective altruism (EA) has been widely disparaged for its flawed moral philosophy and conservative political implications. As philanthropic practice, however, it has been seldom studied. In this paper, we argue that claims to technoscientific expertise are central to how EA actors understand, legitimize, and take part in the production of phila…
Science and democracy on stage at the Science and Technology Select Committee
Why we need a Public Understanding of Social Science
Who is licensed to make knowledge claims about society? A more diffuse group of individuals are afforded the status of legitimate speakers on society in the public sphere than is the case when the questions relate to the expertise of the natural sciences. We draw on the concept of the ‘locus of legitimate interpretation’ and the sensibilities of Collins and Evans’ Studies of Expertise and Experience programme to help make sense of these issues. T…
Making patients political
In this article we develop the concept of the 'idealised policy patient' to contribute to a better understanding of patient-family activism and the mechanisms through which powerful and persuasive patient narratives are facilitated and mobilised. The context through which we explore the idealised policy patient is the UK debates about the legalisation of mitochondrial donation, which primarily took place between 2011 and 2015. In our example, the…
Protesting Populist Knowledge Practices
On 22 April 2017, 10,000 people joined the March for Science London, one of 600 events globally asserting the importance of science against post-truth. Here we report an online and on-the-ground observational study of the London event in its distinct, post-Brexit referendum context. We analyse the motives for marchers’ attendance, and their collective enactment of what science is and why and by what it is threatened. Drawing upon Interaction Ritu…
Interdisciplinary Projects as an Expert-Network
We report an analysis of how an interdisciplinary project bringing together biologists, physicists and engineers worked in practice. The authorship team are the Principle Investigator who led the project, and a social scientist who studied the project as it was conducted by interviewing participants and observing practice. We argue it is accurate and productive to think of the interdisciplinary team as an Expert-Network, which means it was a mana…
“A Moment of Science, Please”
In April 2017, scientists and science sympathizers held marches in the United Kingdom as part of a coordinated international March for Science movement that was held in over 600 cities worldwide. This article reports from participant-observation studies of the marches that took place in London and Cardiff. Supplemented with data from 37 interviews from marchers at the London event, the article reports on an analysis of the placards, focusing on m…
Os Joelhos! Os Joelhos! Protective Embodiment and Occasional Injury in Capoeira
Capoeira , the African-Brazilian dance and martial art has enthusiastic devotees in Britain. Most practitioners are acutely aware of their capoeira embodiment, and have strategies to protect themselves from injury, and ways to seek treatment for any injuries they get. Drawing on data from a long-term ethnography and a set of 32 open-ended interviews with advanced students, the paper explores student strategies to prevent capoeira injuries, and th…
Join our team, change the world
Cultured meat is a novel technology that uses tissue engineering to expand cells taken from animals to grow muscle for consumption as food. Those supporting the technology anticipate it could radically disrupt livestock farming with, they propose, significant benefits for the environment, human health, and animal wellbeing. This paper examines the emergence of this sector through the prism of one of the leading companies - Memphis Meats - in part…
Supplemental Material for Historical Change in Midlife Health, Well-Being, and Despair
In the current study, we included Mexico, which is considered an upper-middle-income and developing nation and the United States, Australia, Germany, and South Korea, which are considered high-income nations. The distinction follows the United Nations (Millennium Development Indicators: World and Regional Groupings, 2003; UN, 2020) that uses the per capita gross national income (GNI) established by the World Bank to classify countries by their le…
The belts are set out
In contemporary capoeira groups, newcomers are symbolically 'baptised' into the community at a public ceremony called their Batizado (literally baptism) held during a festival. Novices play a game with a guest expert, get their first belt and thereafter they are members of their teacher's group. Drawing on a long term, two-handed ethnography of diasporic capoeira contemporanea in the UK, including observation of 53 such festivals, their ceremonia…
Bringing cultured meat to market
BACKGROUND: Cultured meat forms part of the emerging field of cellular agriculture. Still an early stage field it seeks to deliver products traditionally made through livestock rearing in novel forms that require no, or significantly reduced, animal involvement. Key examples include cultured meat, milk, egg white and leather. Here, we focus upon cultured meat and its technical, socio-political and regulatory challenges and opportunities. SCOPE AN…
Blood, meat, and upscaling tissue engineering
Tissue engineering is a set of biomedical technologies, including stem cell science, which seek to grow biological tissue for a diversity of applications. In this paper, we explore two emergent tissue engineering technologies that seek to cause a step change in the upscaling capacity of cell growth: cultured blood and cultured meat. Cultured blood technology seeks to replace blood transfusion with a safe and affordable bioengineered replacement. …
Narrating the First “Three-Parent Baby”
In 2016, the New Scientist announced the birth and good health of the world’s first baby conceived using spindle nuclear transfer (SNT). The story was immediately circulated worldwide. In this article, we analyze 39 articles published within the first 48 hours of the announcement, in the Mexican, British, and U.S. press. These articles constitute the initial press reactions to the announcement, and as such, they offer a narrative ground on which …
The locus of legitimate interpretation in Big Data sciences
This paper argues that analyses of the ways in which Big Data has been enacted in other academic disciplines can provide us with concepts that will help understand the application of Big Data to social questions. We use examples drawn from our Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses of -omic biology and high energy physics to demonstrate the utility of three theoretical concepts: (i) primary and secondary inscriptions, (ii) crafted and foun…
Acts of omission and commission in the embodied learning of diasporic capoeira and swimming
This article compares ethnographic experiences of two settings characterised by embodied learning: the African-Brazilian dance/martial-art/game capoeira, and swimming for fitness and leisure, both as practiced in the UK. We consider the ways in which participants in these scenes stage-manage the display of their learning environments, focusing on the rituals and routines of instruction and practice. Applying Scott's (2018) sociology of nothing as…
The first bite
In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked du…
Doing laboratory ethnography
Laboratory ethnography extended the social scientist's gaze into the day-to-day accomplishment of scientific practice. Here we reflect upon our own ethnographies of biomedical scientific workspaces to provoke methodological discussion on the doing of laboratory ethnography. What we provide is less a 'how to' guide and more a commentary on what to look for and what to look at. We draw upon our empirical research with stem cell laboratories and ani…
Debating CRISPR/cas9 and Mitochondrial Donation
Conferences are important performative sites. Here we detail a UK science policy conference debating the novel biomedical techniques CRISPR/cas9 and mitochondrial donation. Both techniques have received significant attention from scientists and bioethicists about their clinical potential, social implications, and the prospects of genetic and germline modification. In many countries the policy debates on regulating both technologies is ongoing and…
Collecting data from elites and ultra elites
This article explores the author's experiences of conducting both face-to-face and telephone interviews with elite and ultra-elite respondents. It draws upon the author's PhD research that uses a Sociology of Scientific Knowledge perspective to understand the social construction of macroeconomics. The article demonstrates how this perspective, and contributions from broader methodological texts, shaped the evolving research practice. The author r…
Balancing the Berimbau
This article is an unusual reflexive text. It has two authors, two voices, two embodied experiences, and two sociological biographies in dialogue. The empirical focus is capoeira, but the ethnographic experience is common to many cultural forms. Capoeira is the Brazilian dance and martial art, done to the music of the berimbau. Classes are offered in many European countries, as well as in North America. Two sociologists, one a practitioner, the o…
Up on the Roof
The majority of the popular martial arts in Britain are of South East Asian origin. One exception is the Brazilian dance and martial art capoeira, which has grown in popularity in the UK over the past twenty years at the same time as it has become a global phenomenon. Brazilian teachers have spread across the globe to create what the article calls diasporic capoeira.The ethnographic research reported here focuses on how Brazilian capoeira teacher…
Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape
In vitro meat (IVM), also known as cultured meat, involves growing cells into muscle tissue to be eaten as food. The technology had its most high-profile moment in 2013 when a cultured burger was cooked and tasted in a press conference. Images of the burger featured in the international media and were circulated across the Internet. These images-literally marks on a two-dimensional surface-do important work in establishing what IVM is and what it…
Doing laboratory ethnography
Laboratory ethnography extended the social scientist's gaze into the day-to-day accomplishment of scientific practice. Here we reflect upon our own ethnographies of biomedical scientific workspaces to provoke methodological discussion on the doing of laboratory ethnography. What we provide is less a 'how to' guide and more a commentary on what to look for and what to look at. We draw upon our empirical research with stem cell laboratories and ani…
I Can See it in the Nightclub
This paper reports an ethnographic study of how Brazilians teaching capoeira in the UK use dance as a discursive and embodied pedagogic strategy both to change men's bodies and also to gauge the success of their instructional work. The theoretical framework is drawn from Herzfeld's neglected study of the poetics of manhood in Crete which is revisited in the light of his subsequent analysis of the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic …
I'm your teacher, I'm Brazilian!’ Authenticity and authority in European capoeira
Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art is now globalised and taught widely outside Brazil. Instruction is provided by Brazilians who are living in self-imposed exile from their homeland. The authentic capoeira that such teachers provide is a major attraction for non-Brazilian students. However, there is little research available on the motivations and strategies of overseas capoeira instructors. Building on a long term ethnographic study, …
Growing Meat in Laboratories
Over the last decade, several clusters of scientists have been using animal cells in an attempt to grow meat. Known as in vitro, or cultured, meat, the technology involves tissue engineering muscle cells for potential consumption as food. Those supporting the technology articulate a diversity of potential benefits in producing meat in this way, which include environmental-, health-, innovation-, and animal-welfare-related benefits. This essay rep…
Roda Boa, Roda Boa
They start to get malicia ’
The sociological study of education involves focusing upon teaching and learning, upon explicit instruction and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge and skills that are essential if learners are to become enculturated into a new habitus. Sociological insight into these processes can come from research on conventional educational settings, but is greater when unfamiliar, settings are studied. This paper focuses upon a pedagogic setting of an unc…
The UK Stem Cell Bank
In 2004 the United Kingdom opened the world's first stem cell bank. The UK Stem Cell Bank takes donations of ethically approved stem cell lines, tests them, grows larger stocks, and re-distributes the material internationally. As such the Bank has an important guardianship role in the international movement of human embryonic stem cell lines. It also enacts a particular future vision of stem cell science. Its strategies involve a complex temporal…
Closing the regulatory regress
Contemporary biomedical research is conducted amidst regimes of national and transnational regulation. Regulation, like rules generally, cannot specify all the practicalities of their application. Regulations for biomedical research impose considerable constraints on laboratories and others. In principle, there is a never-ending regress whereby scientists have to provide increasingly more guarantees that protocols have been followed, standards re…
Documenting the doable and doing the documented
We explore the local negotiation of regulatory practice at the UK Stem Cell Bank, the first Bank of its type in the world. Basing our empirical work on a detailed analysis of one aspect of the Bank's regulatory commitment--the completion of the Cell Line Information form--we make visible the necessary judgements and labour involved in interpreting and operationalizing externally imposed regulation. The discussion opens by detailing the problems e…
Narrating the First “Three-Parent Baby”
In 2016, the New Scientist announced the birth and good health of the world’s first baby conceived using spindle nuclear transfer (SNT). The story was immediately circulated worldwide. In this article, we analyze 39 articles published within the first 48 hours of the announcement, in the Mexican, British, and U.S. press. These articles constitute the initial press reactions to the announcement, and as such, they offer a narrative ground on which …
Why we need a Public Understanding of Social Science
Who is licensed to make knowledge claims about society? A more diffuse group of individuals are afforded the status of legitimate speakers on society in the public sphere than is the case when the questions relate to the expertise of the natural sciences. We draw on the concept of the ‘locus of legitimate interpretation’ and the sensibilities of Collins and Evans’ Studies of Expertise and Experience programme to help make sense of these issues. T…
Join our team, change the world
Cultured meat is a novel technology that uses tissue engineering to expand cells taken from animals to grow muscle for consumption as food. Those supporting the technology anticipate it could radically disrupt livestock farming with, they propose, significant benefits for the environment, human health, and animal wellbeing. This paper examines the emergence of this sector through the prism of one of the leading companies - Memphis Meats - in part…
Internationaliser des standards, mettre en banque avec confiance
Cet article traite du mouvement international de lignées de cellules souches embryonnaires humaines au travers des banques de cellules souches. Il s'appuie sur deux projets de recherche. Le premier est une étude de trois ans de la ' Banque de cellules souches du Royaume-Uni ' qui s'intéresse aussi à la banque équivalente en Espagne. Le second est une étude qui documente la chaîne pourvoyeuse de lignées de cellules souches en Inde. Notre article s…
The belts are set out
In contemporary capoeira groups, newcomers are symbolically 'baptised' into the community at a public ceremony called their Batizado (literally baptism) held during a festival. Novices play a game with a guest expert, get their first belt and thereafter they are members of their teacher's group. Drawing on a long term, two-handed ethnography of diasporic capoeira contemporanea in the UK, including observation of 53 such festivals, their ceremonia…
The locus of legitimate interpretation in Big Data sciences
This paper argues that analyses of the ways in which Big Data has been enacted in other academic disciplines can provide us with concepts that will help understand the application of Big Data to social questions. We use examples drawn from our Science and Technology Studies (STS) analyses of -omic biology and high energy physics to demonstrate the utility of three theoretical concepts: (i) primary and secondary inscriptions, (ii) crafted and foun…
Acts of omission and commission in the embodied learning of diasporic capoeira and swimming
This article compares ethnographic experiences of two settings characterised by embodied learning: the African-Brazilian dance/martial-art/game capoeira, and swimming for fitness and leisure, both as practiced in the UK. We consider the ways in which participants in these scenes stage-manage the display of their learning environments, focusing on the rituals and routines of instruction and practice. Applying Scott's (2018) sociology of nothing as…
Institutional Imaginaries of Publics in Stem Cell Banking
The UK and Spanish Stem Cell Banks hold politically controversial—but potentially therapeutically beneficial—human embryonic stem cells for distribution to research laboratories globally. The UK bank was the first of its type in the world, opening in 2004, and the Spanish bank used it as a role model in its own development. Both banks structure their operations in response to how their staffs imagine the publics in their nation make trust judgeme…
Effective altruism, technoscience and the making of philanthropic value
A recent philanthropic movement with advocates among high-profile tech entrepreneurs and philosophers, effective altruism (EA) has been widely disparaged for its flawed moral philosophy and conservative political implications. As philanthropic practice, however, it has been seldom studied. In this paper, we argue that claims to technoscientific expertise are central to how EA actors understand, legitimize, and take part in the production of phila…
Making patients political
In this article we develop the concept of the 'idealised policy patient' to contribute to a better understanding of patient-family activism and the mechanisms through which powerful and persuasive patient narratives are facilitated and mobilised. The context through which we explore the idealised policy patient is the UK debates about the legalisation of mitochondrial donation, which primarily took place between 2011 and 2015. In our example, the…
Os Joelhos! Os Joelhos! Protective Embodiment and Occasional Injury in Capoeira
Capoeira , the African-Brazilian dance and martial art has enthusiastic devotees in Britain. Most practitioners are acutely aware of their capoeira embodiment, and have strategies to protect themselves from injury, and ways to seek treatment for any injuries they get. Drawing on data from a long-term ethnography and a set of 32 open-ended interviews with advanced students, the paper explores student strategies to prevent capoeira injuries, and th…
Unexpected tissue and the biobank that closed
Unanticipated situations can arise in biobanking. This paper empirically documents unexpected situations at the anonymous biobank 'Xbank'. Firstly, Xbank received an unexpected and significant quantity of tissue from the historical archive of a hospital network. Secondly, Xbank had its funding withdrawn before the designated end date for the grant, meaning the bank needed to either re-house or destroy its holdings. This paper articulates and uses…
Balancing the Berimbau
This article is an unusual reflexive text. It has two authors, two voices, two embodied experiences, and two sociological biographies in dialogue. The empirical focus is capoeira, but the ethnographic experience is common to many cultural forms. Capoeira is the Brazilian dance and martial art, done to the music of the berimbau. Classes are offered in many European countries, as well as in North America. Two sociologists, one a practitioner, the o…
The Monitoring of the Intellectual Sector Services
2006
Collecting data from elites and ultra elites
This article explores the author's experiences of conducting both face-to-face and telephone interviews with elite and ultra-elite respondents. It draws upon the author's PhD research that uses a Sociology of Scientific Knowledge perspective to understand the social construction of macroeconomics. The article demonstrates how this perspective, and contributions from broader methodological texts, shaped the evolving research practice. The author r…
The UK Stem Cell Bank as performative architecture
Since November 2006 the UK Stem Cell Bank has made human embryonic stem cell lines available for international distribution. As the first Bank of its type in the world it has an important role in the movement and guardianship of stem cell material. In this paper we discuss the flows of people and biological material through the very building itself. By taking issues of space seriously we make explicit a number of arrangements that are central to …
Stem cell spaces, places and flows
The UK Stem Cell Bank
In 2004 the United Kingdom opened the world's first stem cell bank. The UK Stem Cell Bank takes donations of ethically approved stem cell lines, tests them, grows larger stocks, and re-distributes the material internationally. As such the Bank has an important guardianship role in the international movement of human embryonic stem cell lines. It also enacts a particular future vision of stem cell science. Its strategies involve a complex temporal…
Up on the Roof
The majority of the popular martial arts in Britain are of South East Asian origin. One exception is the Brazilian dance and martial art capoeira, which has grown in popularity in the UK over the past twenty years at the same time as it has become a global phenomenon. Brazilian teachers have spread across the globe to create what the article calls diasporic capoeira.The ethnographic research reported here focuses on how Brazilian capoeira teacher…
Roda Boa, Roda Boa
They start to get malicia ’
The sociological study of education involves focusing upon teaching and learning, upon explicit instruction and the acquisition of the tacit knowledge and skills that are essential if learners are to become enculturated into a new habitus. Sociological insight into these processes can come from research on conventional educational settings, but is greater when unfamiliar, settings are studied. This paper focuses upon a pedagogic setting of an unc…
I'm your teacher, I'm Brazilian!’ Authenticity and authority in European capoeira
Capoeira, the Brazilian dance and martial art is now globalised and taught widely outside Brazil. Instruction is provided by Brazilians who are living in self-imposed exile from their homeland. The authentic capoeira that such teachers provide is a major attraction for non-Brazilian students. However, there is little research available on the motivations and strategies of overseas capoeira instructors. Building on a long term ethnographic study, …
Documenting the doable and doing the documented
We explore the local negotiation of regulatory practice at the UK Stem Cell Bank, the first Bank of its type in the world. Basing our empirical work on a detailed analysis of one aspect of the Bank's regulatory commitment--the completion of the Cell Line Information form--we make visible the necessary judgements and labour involved in interpreting and operationalizing externally imposed regulation. The discussion opens by detailing the problems e…
Internationaliser des standards, mettre en banque avec confiance
Cet article traite du mouvement international de lignées de cellules souches embryonnaires humaines au travers des banques de cellules souches. Il s'appuie sur deux projets de recherche. Le premier est une étude de trois ans de la ' Banque de cellules souches du Royaume-Uni ' qui s'intéresse aussi à la banque équivalente en Espagne. Le second est une étude qui documente la chaîne pourvoyeuse de lignées de cellules souches en Inde. Notre article s…
Space, place and temporality in stem cell and cancer tissue banking
Institutional Imaginaries of Publics in Stem Cell Banking
The UK and Spanish Stem Cell Banks hold politically controversial—but potentially therapeutically beneficial—human embryonic stem cells for distribution to research laboratories globally. The UK bank was the first of its type in the world, opening in 2004, and the Spanish bank used it as a role model in its own development. Both banks structure their operations in response to how their staffs imagine the publics in their nation make trust judgeme…
Growing Meat in Laboratories
Over the last decade, several clusters of scientists have been using animal cells in an attempt to grow meat. Known as in vitro, or cultured, meat, the technology involves tissue engineering muscle cells for potential consumption as food. Those supporting the technology articulate a diversity of potential benefits in producing meat in this way, which include environmental-, health-, innovation-, and animal-welfare-related benefits. This essay rep…
Introduction to Special Issue on Animal Biotechnology
The essays in this special issue emerged from a workshop held at Cardiff University in September 2010. As sociologists based at the dual-site (Lancaster and Cardiff) Centre for Economic and Social Aspects of Genomics (Cesagen) funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council, we have both been engaged in researching ethical and social issues around animal biotechnologies for a number of years. The aim of the workshop was to address various e…
Closing the regulatory regress
Contemporary biomedical research is conducted amidst regimes of national and transnational regulation. Regulation, like rules generally, cannot specify all the practicalities of their application. Regulations for biomedical research impose considerable constraints on laboratories and others. In principle, there is a never-ending regress whereby scientists have to provide increasingly more guarantees that protocols have been followed, standards re…
I Can See it in the Nightclub
This paper reports an ethnographic study of how Brazilians teaching capoeira in the UK use dance as a discursive and embodied pedagogic strategy both to change men's bodies and also to gauge the success of their instructional work. The theoretical framework is drawn from Herzfeld's neglected study of the poetics of manhood in Crete which is revisited in the light of his subsequent analysis of the embodiment of ethnographic practice. Ethnographic …
Closure of a human tissue biobank
Biobanks are increasingly being established to act as mediators between patient-donors and researchers. In practice, some of these will close. This paper details the experiences of one such bank. We report interviews with the bank's staff and oversight group during the period when the bank ceased biobanking activity, reconfigured as a disseminator of best practice, before then closing altogether. The paper makes three distinct contributions: (i) …
Unexpected tissue and the biobank that closed
Unanticipated situations can arise in biobanking. This paper empirically documents unexpected situations at the anonymous biobank 'Xbank'. Firstly, Xbank received an unexpected and significant quantity of tissue from the historical archive of a hospital network. Secondly, Xbank had its funding withdrawn before the designated end date for the grant, meaning the bank needed to either re-house or destroy its holdings. This paper articulates and uses…
Debating CRISPR/cas9 and Mitochondrial Donation
Conferences are important performative sites. Here we detail a UK science policy conference debating the novel biomedical techniques CRISPR/cas9 and mitochondrial donation. Both techniques have received significant attention from scientists and bioethicists about their clinical potential, social implications, and the prospects of genetic and germline modification. In many countries the policy debates on regulating both technologies is ongoing and…
Local biologicals and the politics of standardization
In 2003, the United Kingdom and Japan had adopted relatively similar approaches to human embryonic stem cells science. The decade since has witnessed significant divergence in their national policies as differing responses to ethical questions about research use of human embryos emerged. The United Kingdom pursued a vision of ‘institutionally accredited stem cells’ by reconfiguring the role of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority and …
A Pilot Examination of a Mosque-Based Physical Activity Intervention for South Asian Muslim Women in Ontario, Canada
Promise and Ontological Ambiguity in the In vitro Meat Imagescape
In vitro meat (IVM), also known as cultured meat, involves growing cells into muscle tissue to be eaten as food. The technology had its most high-profile moment in 2013 when a cultured burger was cooked and tasted in a press conference. Images of the burger featured in the international media and were circulated across the Internet. These images-literally marks on a two-dimensional surface-do important work in establishing what IVM is and what it…
The first bite
In this article, we analyse a 2013 press conference hosting the world’s first tasting of a laboratory grown hamburger. We explore this as a media event: an exceptional performative moment in which common meanings are mobilised and a connection to a shared centre of reality is offered. We develop our own theoretical contribution – the promotional public – to characterise the affirmative and partial patchwork of carefully selected actors invoked du…
Sociology (37 obras) · Political science (26 obras) · Law (16 obras) · Epistemology (15 obras) · Biology (13 obras) · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation (13 obras) · Engineering (13 obras) · Art (12 obras) · Psychology (12 obras) · Public relations (12 obras)