Race in clinical trials in Sweden

How regulatory and medical standards in clinical research trump the post-racial discourse

Bibliographic Data

ID2250293
AuthorsShai Mulinari (0000-0001-8773-9796, Department of Sociology Lund University Lund Sweden, corresponding author), Anna Bredström (0000-0001-5451-8540, Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO) Linköping University Norrköping Sweden)
Year2024
Volume46
Issue2
Pages315-332
Publication date2024-02-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/1467-9566.13709
PMID37699725
OpenAlexW4386629632
LanguageEN
Citations received3
References cited63

The post-racial discourse that permeates many Western European countries depicts society as having moved beyond race concepts and classifications. This article focuses on Sweden, a country that, in line with the post-racial thinking, declares race to be an offensive and unscientific concept. The article investigates what happens when this post-racial discourse meets clinical research standards that encourage, if not demand, the collection of data on patient race. Through an analysis of the reporting of patient race in 76 multinational trials with at least one study site in Sweden, and a review of the regulatory and medical standards and trial documents that direct the collection of patient race in trials, we show how race classification is kept intact in trials despite conflicting with post-racial norms and conventions. Notably, our findings diverge from the way racialisation is typically assumed to work in Sweden and related countries. We argue this is possible because the two incompatible understandings of race are 'distributed' (Mol, 2002, The body multiple: Ontology in medical practice, Duke University Press) among different social worlds. The distribution, we propose, is upheld through the paucity of major debate on why and how race classification should be carried out in clinical trials in Europe as this allows contradictions to remain unspoken

Clinical trial · Multinational corporation · Offensive · Operations research · Pathology · Political science · Race (biology · Sociology · Ethics in Clinical Research · Medicine · Race, Genetics, and Society · Racial and Ethnic Identity Research · Gender Studies · Law

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