4:00pm |
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"Situated Intervention: Sociological Experiments in Healthcare"
(Diversity)
Teun Zuiderent-Jerak
Associate Professor, Science & Technology Studies
Institute of Health Policy and Management
Erasmus University Rotterdam
Lavery Hall 335
(the new building next to the nearest ICTAS Building)
Abstract Whereas empirical philosophers of science such as Ian Hacking have stressed the importance of intervention and tinkering within the sciences to produce robust knowledge about entities, and although STS has a long history of analyzing the importance of material agency, such insights have had limited consequences for the practices of doing STS research. Calls for STS to intervene in the practices it studies have been met with skepticism at times, as they tend to make a moral claim about the need for this scholarly field to be engaged with practices. The topic of intervention thereby risks dividing the field in analytically focused scholars, who are not interested in intervention as a research method, and politically motivated scholars, who capture intervention for their normative agenda's. Through this dynamics, intervention in STS risks losing what it may be most interesting for: the production of interesting interlockings of representing and intervening. In this talk I explore such interlocking in STS research in the organization of oncology care. I analyze how interventions that are situated in STS analyses of medical practices lead to both new practices of oncology care and different discussions within STS on standardization.
This talk is free and open to the public, so bring a friend, and forget your wallets. Queries? shew@vt.edu
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