Article ID: CBB362744143

Identifying ontologies in a clinical trial (2013)

unapi

Brives, Charlotte (Author)


Social Studies of Science
Volume: 43
Issue: 3
Pages: 397-416


Publication Date: 2013
Edition Details: Special Issue: A Turn to Ontology in Science and Technology Studies?
Language: English

For a number of years, clinical trials have been the focus of a growing body of social science research and have come to represent the gold standard of evidence-based medicine. While a considerable and wide-ranging body of research has been devoted to trial participants, the approach is partial in that the participants’ reality tends to be cut loose from the very practices that constitute the beating heart of the trials. The practices of clinical research tend to be accepted as an unquestioned premise from which myriad actions and consequences emerge. Following the praxiological turn initiated by Mol and basing my analysis on my fieldwork and an ethnographic account of the running of a clinical trial, I hope to propose a new reading of trial participation. Indeed, whatever their form or their objectives, trials are essentially scientific experiments and are invariably grounded in a clinical design. The individuals who take part in trials must also contend with these two types of practices – the clinical and the scientific – yet in terms of their significance for participants, the latter are often obscured by or reduced to the former. Using my account of a routine visit in a trial conducted in Burkina Faso, I would like to examine the specific nature of these research practices, and in doing so, identify the ontologies they involve. How do these practices do the body? And what might the consequences be?

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Associated with

Article Woolgar, Steve; Lezaun, Javier (June 2013) The wrong bin bag: A turn to ontology in science and technology studies?. Social Studies of Science (pp. 321-340). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB362744143/

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Authors & Contributors
Hillman, Alexandra
Christopher McKevitt
Andreas Kolb
Natali Valdez
Justin Carone
Natassia F. Brenman
Concepts
Technoscience; science and technology studies
Medicine
Ethnography
Human immunodeficiency viruses (HIV)
Clinical trials
Health care
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, early
20th century
Places
Africa
United States
Philadelphia, PA
Democratic Republic of the Congo
Ethiopia
Botswana
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