Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for the study of the making of values in society, exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine and asking how values are at play.
This means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals and publics regularly do, in order to define what counts as proper conduct in science and health care, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing.
A number of analytical and methodological means to investigate these concerns are presented. The editors introduce a way to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the enacting, ordering and displacing of values. They argue that a research programme of this kind, makes it possible to move orthogonally to the question of what values are, and thus ask how they are constituted. This rectifies some central problems that arise with approaches that depend on stabilized understandings of value. At the heart of it, such a research programme encourages the examination of how and with what means certain things come to count as valuable and desirable, how registers of value are ordered as well as displaced. It further encourages a sense that these matters could be, and sometimes simultaneously are, otherwise.
Isabelle Dussauge, Researcher, Center for Gender Research, University of Uppsala, Claes-Fredrik Helgesson, Professor, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change, Linkoping University, Francis Lee, Assistant Professor, Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and social change, Linkoping University
Isabelle Dussauge is a researcher at the Center for Gender Research at the University of Uppsala. Her primary research interests are in the science and politics of the body, at the intersection of science and technology studies, gender studies, and the history of medicine. She has worked with visualization in medicine; the early computerization of health care; and the place of the brain in contemporary culture. She is currently concluding the research project entitled "Brain Desires", a critical inquiry into the contemporary neurosciences of sexuality and pleasure.
Claes-Fredrik Helgesson is professor in Technology and Social Change at Linkoping University, Sweden. His research interest concerns the intertwining of economic organising, science and technology. The theoretical inspiration comes primarily from economic sociology and social studies of science and technology (STS). His current project "Trials of Value" together with Francis Lee, investigates the designing of controlled medical experiments as a site where scientific, medical and economic values at play when establishing what knowledge is worth pursuing. Helgesson is co-founder and co-editor of Valuation Studies, a new open access journal, which published its first issue in spring 2013.
Francis Lee is assistant professor at the Department of Thematic Studies - Technology and Social Change at Linko?ping University, Sweden. His primary research interests are in the practices, politics and technologies of knowledge. His work has dealt with the valuation of knowledge in the biosciences, epistemic standards in education, and exclusion in sociotechnical processes. He is currently studying research design as a valuation of biomedical knowledge in the project "Trials of Value" with C-F Helgesson.
