Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference 2018

Kane Race (Session chair)
Kiran Pienaar (Session chair)
Dean Anthony Murphy (Session chair)

Sociology & Anthropology

Activity: Participating in or organising an event types › Contribution to conference

Description

Co-convened and co-chaired Open panel titled ‘Producing Transformations: Drugs, bodies, and experimentation’ at the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S) Conference, Sydney, 28 August -1 September 2018

Period	29 Aug 2018 → 1 Sept 2018
Event type	Conference
Location	Sydney, Australia, New South WalesShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International

Documents & Links

Producing Transformations: Drugs, bodies, and experimentation Throughout history, drugs and medications have been used to produce transformations. Experiments with different substances have taken place in diverse contexts: individual, subcultural, communal, scientific, medical, commercial, criminal/illicit and transnational. Despite the immense diversity and heterogeneity of these experiments, each is subject to specific norms, protocols, evaluative criteria, and concerns; and each often entails assembling publics to validate their findings or assess whatever emerges from them. This Open Panel invites papers about the transformations (intended or otherwise) associated with different practices of drug experimentation and consumption. Against commonplace understandings of drugs as stable entities with unique chemical properties that act to produce identifiable effects, the ontological turn in STS inspires a growing number of drug researchers to conceive the action of drugs and their purported effects to be produced in relation to various other actors, arrangements and networks. How do the practical arrangements devised to put drugs to the test in different places and times tally with the historical, cultural, technological and material processes in which drugs are implicated, and which undoubtedly mediate, extend, and complicate their effects? How are those transformations that extend beyond the experimental apparatus accounted for? What gets neglected? What criteria render specific experiments legitimate, and others illicit, and how are these criteria contested, changed, and/or adapted over time? What is unique about the adventures such experimental subjects undertake? What matters to them? What can be learned from situating their activities? How are their findings translated to other situations, and with what implications?

Society for Social Studies of Science Annual Conference 2018

Description

Documents & Links

Related content

Projects

Chemical practices: Enhancement and experimentation