MEDICAL TECHNOLOGY AND PRACTICES

Give blood! Give life? The social, technical and symbolic constitution of blood donation. Sweden 1870–2000

The project focuses on the sociotechnical history of blood donation and transfusion in Sweden since the late 19th century. It consists of a number of stories about linkages between donor and patient bodies, bottles, instruments, apparatuses and professionals, from the early (and unsuccessful) transfusions with lamb blood in the 1870s to the creation of a world-wide blood industry in the late 20th century. Chapters in a forthcoming book also include accounts of the transformation of donor identities over time and of how the risk of AIDS was perceived and acted upon by donors and medical authorities in the early 1980s.

Contact: Boel Berner

Better care at a distance? E-health, telemedicine, and medical practice

The aim of this project (financed by the Swedish Research Council; project leader: Boel Berner) is to give greater knowledge about the social context of telemedical innovations in everyday medical care. Advanced information- and communication technology has the potential to drastically change the conditions for modern health care. More and more people get health information or drugs from the Internet, communicate with each other within medical chat groups, or use the internet to organize patient or carer organizations. Care at a distance, or telemedicine, promises to provide more accessible care, cheaper care, care to otherwise disadvantaged social groups or parts of the country, better home care, etc. Some of these promises are investigated in the project, with the help of perspectives from Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical anthropology and sociology.

The project consists of two separate projects. In the first we will investigate how the use of various forms of e-health and telemedicine interact with patients’ illness identities, knowledge, and relations to the health care sector. Does patients’ increased use of information and communication via Internet imply greater knowledge and greater demands for influence in relation to doctors and other care givers? If so, how does the health care sector handle these changes and demands? In focus are aspects of how persons with diagnosed breast cancer and prostata cancer use the Internet.

Contact for this part: Anna Morvall

The second project studies how processes of diagnoses and care are organized within the medical sector; how interactions, patterns of communication and divisions of labour are changed, or need to be changed, with care at a distance. We are interested in the use of information technology and communication at a distance between different kinds of medical personnel, both within pre-hospital care (between ambulances and hospitals) and within and between hospital clinics

Contact for this part: Tobias Samuelsson

Brain desires: neuroimaging of human sexuality 1988-2008

Brain scans of homosexuality and images of male and female brains have become a common element of popular scientific news. How is sexuality re-described and re-produced when studied in brain scanners?

brain desires explores the cultural production of sexuality in the growing field of neuroimaging research (i.e. imaging of brain activity) and in the Swedish media.
In focus is what I coin neuroframing of sexuality, i.e. the cultural process by which sexuality becomes understood as a matter of brain activity, contained within the brain and visualizable with medical imaging technologies. brain desires may then described as a critical investigation of the neuroframing of human sexuality in the last two decades.

This project is a cooperation with Ingeborg Svensson (Umeå University), Anelis Kaiser (Basel University, Switzerland), and the Centre for Gender Research, Uppsala University, where it was originally developed. Start 2009.

Contact: Isabelle Dussauge

Automating the collective body: health screenings and computerization in Sweden 1960-1980

The history of the post-WWII expansion of primary health care structures in Sweden is tightly linked to that of automation and computing. This project investigates how welfare visions of a large-scale improvement and monitoring of people's health required and promoted the experimental establishment of new infrastructures such as automation of administrative patient information and laboratory testing in health screenings. One hypothesis is that the development and implementation of automated and computerized methods in health screenings enacted a specific form of public control over a collective body under partial redefinition. The overall approach of this project emphasizes technology as a critical infrastructure for the production of health, knowledge and control in Swedish welfare society.
This project emerged within a broader research program, "Precursors of the IT Nation: Computer Use and Control in Swedish Society, 1955-1985" hosted by the Dept of History of Science and Technology, KTH, Stockholm. My primary research partner in the project is Julia Peralta, Örebrö University. Start 2009.

Contact: Isabelle Dussauge

Learning emotion management – identity work, emotions and community of practice among midwives

The project is part of a larger study focusing on vocations within emotionally intense environments. The aim of this project is to study emotion management and identity work of “becoming a midwife” as part of learning a professional culture. More specifically, studying the process of midwifery students learning to manage the emotions they express and emotions of others according to feeling rules within their profession. The learning process of emotion management and a professional attitude is studied in relation to midwives’ experience based bodily knowledge (for example when the midwifery students learn to use their hands when examining a pregnant woman) and the technical skills (how midwifery students learn to manage technology use within maternity care). The project, which is financed by the Swedish Research Council, started in 2008 and will continue until 2012.

Contact: Jenny Gleisner

Att presentera patienter: Anestesiologers samtal inom intensivvård

Contact: Lina Larsson

On the organising of large clinical trails

This research project looks at large clinical trials as considerable achievements. A large clinical trial can take several years and can involve tens of thousands of patients as well as a large number of organisations. One central issue for the project is to investigate how the organising of activities converts what is spatially and temporally scattered into condensed results that have a significant scientific authority. A special interest is thus placed on the distributed character of clinical trials and how the activities related to this spatial distribution participates in shaping the kind of results the trials produce.

Contact: Claes-Fredrik Helgesson