Collating Publics In Collections Of Human Biological Material And Data 2

Session Submission Type: Open Panel

Abstract

The panel seeks to explore how particular ‘publics’ – of citizens, stakeholders, populations, or otherwise – are put together through collections of human biological materials and data. Contributions study how publics are co-produced in technoscientific, social and political orders that shape the formation of repositories containing human biological materials and data (as applied in e.g. the medical, forensic, migration policy context). Papers address, but are not limited to, the following questions: how database systems and their classifications configure ontological entities with particular normative ascriptions of publics; how practices of taking samples, producing, storing and exchanging materials and data, and governing databases enact, affect or mobilize notions of citizenship; how political issues produced by and reflected in such databases are negotiated and thereby (re)make affected publics and forms of (biological) citizenship; how the materiality of database infrastructures and networks that make databases work enable or constrain imaginaries of collectives; how such databases give rise to ecologies of participation that mobilize engagement. In this panel contributions present empirically rich and conceptually informed reflections on the relations between the collection of human biological materials and data, and the formation of diverse publics and forms of citizenship, across different cultural locations, contexts of application and forms of storage. With the contributions to this panel, we thereby explore the empirical, theoretical and political significance of how human collectives are imagined in practices of collecting.

In this second session papers focus more on how publics are made together with particular research objects.

Sub Unit

• Papers for Open Panels / Collating publics in collections of human biological material and data

Chair

• Nina Amelung, University of Minho

Discussant

• Erik Aarden, University of Vienna

Individual Presentations

• Neuroscience of race and the production of biological citizens - Torsten H Voigt, RWTH Aachen University

• Connective tissues: making intergenerational publics in a regional placenta biobank - Maria Fannin, University of Bristol; Julie Kent, University of the West of England

• Involving citizens in the data bank: a case study of the China Marrow Donor Program - xiaojie li, Center for Data Science in Health and Medicine,Peking University

• Exploring a Global Imaginary of Biobanking - Edwina Light, Sydney Health Ethics, University of Sydney; Lisa Dive, Sydney Health Ethics; Miriam Wiersma, Sydney Health Ethics; Ian Kerridge, Sydney Health Ethics; Wendy Lipworth, Sydney Health Ethics, University of Sydney

Session Organizer

• Torsten H Voigt, RWTH Aachen University