233045 SE The politics of pharmaceutical innovation (2026S)

Pharmaceuticals are fascinating entities through which we can examine the web of relationships between science, industry, and society. They seem to possess an almost magical allure, being imbued with numerous hopes, expectations, and desires, while simultaneously eliciting fears, contestations, and conflicts. Almost everywhere we turn, we encounter striking contradictions between the promises and the perils of pharmaceuticals.
To be sure, in the twentieth century, major accomplishments in the pharmaceutical sciences have dramatically transformed the power of medicine, alleviating suffering by providing chemical tools to address a wide range of diseases and illnesses. This immense success of pharmaceutical research has contributed to an extensive process of pharmaceuticalization, accompanied by an increasing social and political reliance on pharmaceuticals as “magic bullets,” as well as on the pharmaceutical research industry and its presumed capacity for innovation.
Yet this success story is not without tensions and contradictions. These become particularly apparent in cases where pharmaceuticals themselves have created or contributed to crises—both individual and collective, medical and societal—or where pharmaceutical “solutions” fail, or where the innovation processes that produce them stall. As a specific technoscientific capitalist sector, pharmaceutical innovation has been repeatedly shaped by crises driven and exacerbated by multiple factors, including scientific challenges, market failures, and broader shifts in global political economies. Recurring criticisms include a lack of innovation in areas of unmet medical need; misguided R&D priorities; exploitative research practices; aggressive marketing and forms of disease mongering; the strategic neglect of environmental externalities in chemical production; and patent-backed monopoly power which, combined with a pervasive profit orientation, results in overmedication in some populations and a lack of access to essential medicines in others.

AIMS
This seminar develops a nuanced and situated critical understanding of the politics of pharmaceutical innovation by exploring selected aspects of pharmaceutical research, development, commercialization, and consumption.
Drawing on analytical perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and adjacent fields, the seminar approaches innovation as a contested and relational process—and as a boundary object between science, economy, and policy. It foregrounds the tensions, ambiguities, and antinomies through which innovation is imagined, negotiated, governed, and contested across different institutional and epistemic contexts.
Central questions include what comes to count as innovation; how distinctions between good, bad, or dangerous innovations are produced through epistemic and political practices of valuation (including biomedical and financial risk assessment); and which actors are recognized as sources of innovative capacity, and which contributions remain marginalized or rendered invisible. At stake are also questions of the directionality and distribution of innovation processes: who is expected to benefit from innovation, in what ways, and how decisions about relevance, necessity, justice, or desirability are negotiated—and by whom.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES
• Develop a social science research specialization in the politics of innovation by focusing on pharmaceuticals as a specific empirical field
• Gain a solid overview of social studies of pharmaceuticals as a central area within medical STS by engaging with key STS-informed literature and examining topical questions and case studies
• Build an understanding of the relationship between scientific practice and political economy through engagement with key STS scholarship at this intersection

Methods
This seminar is designed as a reading-intensive course. An interest in conceptual debates is a prerequisite. Additional methods include group work and student presentation