230147 SE Political and cultural economics of Pharmaceuticals (2015S)

In recent years, Science and Technology Studies has learned that pharmaceuticals represent a fascinating topic: pharmaceuticals connect science and medicine with cultures and markets, and with regulators, corporations and a broad range of other actors. In this course we will have a number of thematic foci: (1) the use of the pharmaceutical as 'sampling device' to open up and study broader social phenomena, (2) situating the pharmaceutical as an object at the boundaries of the licit and illicit, enhancement and treatment, and normal and pathological (3) interpreting pharmaceutical consumption as a cultural text and a site of identity politics (4) charting the movements of pharmaceuticals as global commodities with heterogeneous maps of access, cost, risk and benefit, (5) understanding the pharmaceutical as a site of knowledge production, through organized clinical trials and through the more inchoate experience with drug risks in the general population, (6) analyzing the creation and maintenance of markets for drugs and knowledge about them, and (7) examining the politics and economies involved in regulating pharmaceutical markets on local and global scales.