Flattening the World for Social Change: How STS studies is inherently a political activity

• In Event: Science and Activism: Medical Approaches

Abstract

This paper illustrates how boundaries are drawn between activism to “save” the UK National Health Service (NHS) and the purportedly apolitical science of hip replacements (an example used due to its current focus on ‘streamlining’ care). It critiques the way in which activists build campaigns around grandiose narratives such as neoliberalism, privatisation, and government, whilst holding healthcare workers “on the ground” as noble and inert. Meanwhile hip surgeons play, or indeed tinker (Mol, Moser and Pols, 2010), with anaesthetic mixes, materials for hip implants, and surgical tools to reduce the time patients spend in hospital after their operation. Whilst this paper traces how these everyday ‘innovative’ techniques have potentially negative effects on patients and indeed contribute to some of the activists’ concerns, healthcare staff view themselves as apolitical. The politics of the NHS is seen as a ceiling too high to reach; an idea which is materialised through the campaigners’ leaflets, marches, and petitions. This paper argues that the everyday actions of both activists and healthcare staff build hierarchical boundaries which close down opportunities for social change. Rather, we should focus on STS studies’ propensity to flatten structures and “act on the world” by tracing how everyday practices contribute to the doing or undoing of power (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Singleton and Law, 2013). I argue that this is an inherently political exercise whereby actors are given the agency to break those hierarchical structures and unmake the ties of power previously positioned in some far-off, overbearing, social or economic realm.

Author

• Hannah Cowan, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine