Lene Koch

The sociology of entrenchment: a cystic fibrosis test for everyone?

In this article we introduce the notion of entrenchment to conceptualize the processes in which new technological options, through the interactions between a variety of actors, become viable and established practices in society, both satisfying and modifying needs and interests. The notion of entrenchment we use as a framework for an analysis of developments and debates in the field of cystic fibrosis testing and screening in Denmark. On the one hand, it appears that the development and introduction of cystic fibrosis (CF) screening to some extent is predetermined both by existing networks of human genome researchers, clinical geneticists, patients (organizations), funding organizations, and regulatory agencies, and by existing practices like that of prenatal diagnosis. On the other hand, in Denmark, the content and future of CF screening is shaped in ongoing processes or articulation of demand for screening and of its cultural and political acceptability, processes which also involve political decision-making and which (may) result in new networks and regimes. Yet, what appears to be an inherent and undecided part of the process of entrenchment of CF screening in Denmark, is how to allocate responsibilities and authority to decide what is acceptable and what not.

The meaning of eugenics: reflections on the government of genetic knowledge in the past and the present.

The recent development of molecular genetics has created concern that society may experience a new eugenics. Notions about eugenics and what took place in the 1930s and 1940s are actively shaping questions about which uses of new genetics should be considered illegitimate. Drawing upon a body of historiographical literature on Scandinavian eugenics, this paper argues that the dominant view of eugenics as morally and scientifically illegitimate is not tenable when it comes to the uses of compulsion, political motivation, and scientific acceptability. In spite of a general condemnation of eugenics, health authorities today are trying to prevent individuals with deviant behavior from reproducing or at least from rearing children. This may not be argued with reference to the risk of transmitting defective genes, but rather the risk of producing undesirable social problems. Drawing on a Foucauldian approach, the paper concludes that eugenics and new genetics should be seen as two historically specific forms of biopower.

Potentializing the Research Piglet in Experimental Neonatal Research

This paper explores the socio-moral-material practices by which the piglet is imbued with potential for human health by making it a substitute for the preterm infant in need of treatment. Based on fieldwork in a Danish perinatal pig laboratory, we view the experimental practice as a sacrifice and argue that it is characterized by two forms of exchange: a calculative exchange that defines an absolute moral difference between humanity and animality and constitutes the piglet as a raw material of science, and a corporeal exchange by which the piglet appears as a sentient substitute belonging to the same collective as the researchers. By focusing on the interaction between these forms of exchange, we highlight the existential aspects of the sacrificial practice and illuminate the many identities of both piglets and researchers produced in the interwoven processes of making, unmaking, and remaking piglets. We suggest that creating space for corporeal exchange and yet taming its power is essential to potentializing piglets.

Negotiating Moral Value A Story of Danish Research Monkeys and Their Humans

In 2004, twelve capuchin monkeys were moved from the labs of the Danish psychiatric hospital of Sankt Hans to a small private-owned zoo in another part of Denmark in order to be rehabilitated. These monkeys were the last nonhuman primates to be used as research animals in Danish biomedical laboratories. The normal procedure would be to kill research animals after the termination of an experiment; in this case, however, a decision was reached to close down the lab. The moral landscape had changed, and it was no longer considered acceptable to use nonhuman primates in Danish biomedicine. From being considered a biological resource serving as a model of man, the monkeys had become moral subjects with a claim to a life suiting their natural needs. Simultaneously, the monkeys became instrumental in creating moral legitimacy for the actors involved in their rescue. What we see is an instance of pathfinding in a changing moral landscape where actors negotiate nonhuman primate nature as they create new moral positions for themselves.

How do we collaborate? Social science researchers’ experience of multidisciplinarity in biomedical settings

In September 2009, a group of social scientists from the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, the United States and Canada met in London to discuss their experiences with fieldwork in biomedical settings, and other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than ‘trouble shoot’, however, the objective of the workshop was to explicate the effects that such interdisciplinary collaborations have on our work and our self-understandings as social scientists. Particular attention was paid to the effects of tacit disciplinary hierarchies and (mis)communication across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. This article summarises the main issues identified at, and main insights obtained from, the workshop, both pertaining to particular stages of carrying out fieldwork (‘getting access’, ‘inside the field’ and ‘outside again’), and to the dynamics of social science research in biomedical settings more generally.

Resisting decay: On disposal, valuation, and care in a dementia nursing home in Denmark

This paper approaches institutionalized dementia care as a site of societal disposal, valuation, and care for human life. Drawing upon six weeks of ethnographic fieldwork and ten qualitative interviews carried out in a Danish dementia nursing home in 2014, we analyze how nursing home staff, through everyday care, uphold the value of life for residents in severe mental and physical decline. We argue that lifes worth is established when residents gain qualities of personhood and agency through substitution processes carried out by staff. Yet the persistent absence of conventional personhood and autonomous agency in residents (i.e. capacities for memory, consciousness, language, and mobility) evokes experiences of ambiguity in staff and relatives of residents. We close the article with a discussion of this ambiguity and the significance of the nursing home as care institution in the welfare state. Dementia care, we propose, is not only about preserving the lives of people with dementia. At stake in the daily care practices around severely disabled residents in the nursing home is the very continuance of the main principles of the welfare society.

Transforming social contracts: the social and cultural history of IVF in Denmark

The introduction of IVF in Denmark was accompanied by social transformations: contestations of medical authority, negotiations of who might access reproductive biomedicine and changes in individual and social identity due to reproductive technologies. Looking at the making of Danish IVF, this article sketches its social and cultural history by revisiting the legal, medical, technological and social developments that characterized the introduction of IVF in Denmark as well as by contextualizing the social research on the uses and impacts of IVF carried out in the 1980s and 1990s within these developments. The making of Danish IVF is presented as a transformative event in so far as it changed Denmark from being a society concerned about the social consequences of reproductive technologies to a moral collective characterized by a joined sense of responsibility for Denmark’s procreative future.

How do we collaborate|[quest]| Social science researchers|[rsquo]| experience of multidisciplinarity in biomedical settings

In September 2009, a group of social scientists from the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, the United States and Canada met in London to discuss their experiences with fieldwork in biomedical settings, and other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than ‘trouble shoot’, however, the objective of the workshop was to explicate the effects that such interdisciplinary collaborations have on our work and our self-understandings as social scientists. Particular attention was paid to the effects of tacit disciplinary hierarchies and (mis)communication across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. This article summarises the main issues identified at, and main insights obtained from, the workshop, both pertaining to particular stages of carrying out fieldwork (‘getting access’, ‘inside the field’ and ‘outside again’), and to the dynamics of social science research in biomedical settings more generally.

How do we collaborate

In September 2009, a group of social scientists from the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, the United States and Canada met in London to discuss their experiences with fieldwork in biomedical settings, and other forms of interdisciplinary collaboration. Rather than ‘trouble shoot’, however, the objective of the workshop was to explicate the effects that such interdisciplinary collaborations have on our work and our self-understandings as social scientists. Particular attention was paid to the effects of tacit disciplinary hierarchies and (mis)communication across disciplinary and epistemological boundaries. This article summarises the main issues identified at, and main insights obtained from, the workshop, both pertaining to particular stages of carrying out fieldwork (‘getting access’, ‘inside the field’ and ‘outside again’), and to the dynamics of social science research in biomedical settings more generally.

Book Reviews : Heidrun Kaupen-Haas (ed.): Der Griff nach der Bevölkerung, Aktualität und Kontinuitat nazistischer Bevölkerungspolitik. Schnften der Hamburger Stiftung fur Socialgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts, Band 1, Hamburg 1986

that German medicine has in no way reconciliated itself with the past. ’Der Vergangenheit wird bewaltigt’, they say, but the above-mentioned controversy, as well as a wave of interesting publications about the relationship between medicine and Nazi policy, shows that this process has only just begun. In a series of publications about Nazi social history from the productive Stiftung fur Socialgeschichte in Hamburg, medical sociologist Heidrun Kaupen-Haas has edited a book about Nazi population policy. The true importance of the anthology lies in its interdisciplinary approach and in the selection of its major theme, the continuity between Nazi science and science in our own age, a theme which the