230127 SE Valuing Life. Investigating the Practices, Normativities and Economies of Contemporary Biomedicine (2014S)

Biomedicine is among the areas where the impact of techno-science on collective and individual life is most strongly felt. Biomedical knowledge, practices and technologies have not only considerably intervened into human biology, but also continue to shape the ways in which humans perceive themselves and others. This has consequently posed new questions about the meaning of human existence and of what it means to live a good life. Against this background, we propose the term 'value' in order to investigate the multiple ways in which biomedicine is intertwined with social, moral and economic orders. We use this notion not in a narrow way, but draw on its multiple meanings and their connections. Within secular postmodern societies health has emerged as a moral value in itself, and maintaining and improving it increasingly has become a lifelong project and normative obligation. Connected to this, health has also become a major economic value, fueling a fast-growing and increasingly global market in pharmaceuticals and biological materials. This has also opened up questions of equality, and of whose lives are valued at which costs, and whose not. Such debates are always guided by imaginations about how things should be and thus about desirable and undesirable sociotechnical futures, pointing to how the development of biomedical knowledge is tied to politically contestable values.

We will trace the multiple ways in which human life is valued and evaluated in biomedicine both through engaging with literature and through empirical examples. In a first reading part in March, we will review together key literature from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related fields. We will further pursue this engagement through visiting together a guest lecture and through collectively watching a movie on biomedical futures. Building on this, students will collaboratively develop projects around four empirical case studies: Debates around cognitive enhancement; patient groups forming around bariatric surgery; digitally supported self-monitoring practices; and negotiations around alternative and complementary medicine. The project work will be presented in a second part of the seminar in the beginning of June.