“Towards Social Studies of (Biomedical) Testing?”

Datum
05. Mai – 07. Mai 2025 

CfP for an hybrid pan­el at the 23rd Annu­al STS Con­fer­ence Graz 2025

CfP for the pan­el “Towards Social Stud­ies of (Bio­med­ical) Testing?”
STS Con­fer­ence Graz 2025 “Crit­i­cal Issues in Sci­ence, Tech­nol­o­gy and Soci­ety Studies“
May 5 to 7, 2025 and on Zoom

Con­venors:
Erik Aar­den (Uni­ver­si­ty of Klagenfurt)
Mara Köh­ler (Karl Land­stein­er Uni­ver­si­ty of Health Sciences)
Vic­to­ria Mek­lin (Uni­ver­si­ty of Klagenfurt)
Ingrid Met­zler (Karl Land­stein­er Uni­ver­si­ty of Health Sciences)

The call for abstracts is open until Jan­u­ary 20, 2025

Towards Social Stud­ies of (Bio­med­ical) Testing?

Over the past three decades, schol­ars in Sci­ence and Tech­nol­o­gy Stud­ies (STS) and relat­ed fields, such as Med­ical Soci­ol­o­gy, Med­ical Anthro­pol­o­gy, Health Pol­i­cy Analy­sis, and Bioethics, have engaged with the phe­nom­e­non of “test­ing in bio­med­i­cine.” Much of this work has focused on spe­cif­ic types of tests or their uses in dis­tinct set­tings. For instance, begin­ning in the late 1980s, schol­ars have stud­ied genet­ic test­ing as it was envi­sioned, devel­oped, and used in clin­i­cal, pub­lic health, or recre­ation­al prac­tices, or com­pared the moral­i­ties of the reg­u­la­to­ry frame­works sus­tain­ing and lim­it­ing its uses. Simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, schol­ars con­tribut­ing to a soci­ol­o­gy of diag­no­sis have inves­ti­gat­ed how test­ing in clin­i­cal prac­tices is involved in “mak­ing up peo­ple” (Hack­ing, 2002). More recent­ly, research has addressed the devel­op­ment, use, and reg­u­la­tions of test­ing in emerg­ing fields such as trans­la­tion­al med­i­cine and pre­ci­sion med­i­cine, pay­ing spe­cial atten­tion to the polit­i­cal economies of test­ing and the author­i­ties involved in their gov­er­nance. Last but not least, emerg­ing bod­ies of schol­ar­ship have explored the role of test­ing as a gov­ern­ing tool in glob­al health ini­tia­tives and pan­dem­ic man­age­ment, par­tic­u­lar­ly in response to COVID-19.

In this pan­el, we aim to use test­ing as a bound­ary object to open up a con­ver­sa­tion between these dif­fer­ent areas of research. Build­ing on work per­formed under the label of the “anthro­pol­o­gy of med­ical test­ing” (Street and Kel­ly, 2021) and the “soci­ol­o­gy of diag­no­sis and screen­ing” (Petersen and Pien­aar, 2021), we pro­pose the label of “social stud­ies of (bio­med­ical) test­ing” or “bio­med­ical test­ing stud­ies” to encour­age inter­dis­ci­pli­nary engagements.

We invite both empir­i­cal and the­o­ret­i­cal con­tri­bu­tions that engage with the envi­sion­ing, devel­op­ment, use, eval­u­a­tion, and reg­u­la­tions of test­ing across diverse bio­med­ical domains. These may include but are not lim­it­ed to: test­ing prac­tices in clin­i­cal, pub­lic health or social ser­vice set­tings; DIY-test­ing; and eco­nom­ic, legal, moral, and polit­i­cal dimen­sions of test­ing as well as the absences or non-use of tests.

Con­fer­ence Page: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/
Abstract Sub­mis­sion: https://www.conftool.com/sts-conference-graz-2025/
Call Link: https://acrobat.adobe.com/id/urn:aaid:sc:EU:5f98cc92-aa88-4cd7-a930-ceff51ffc631
List of Pan­els: https://stsconf.tugraz.at/calls/call-for-abstracts/