Michael Barr

‘I'm not Really Read up on Genetics’: Biobanks and the Social Context of Informed Consent

It is widely recognized that traditional informed consent requirements are highly problematic in the context of population-based genetic research. This article is based on a qualitative study that describes and analyses the consenting procedures and perceptions of donors to the North Cumbria Community Genetics Project (NCCGP), a DNA bank in northwest England. The NCCGP collected placenta and cord tissue, as well as maternal blood samples and health and lifestyle information, in order to conduct genetic epidemiological studies. The findings show that the nature of the sample (i.e. afterbirth) significantly impacted donors’ decision to donate. The antenatal context also influenced the way the request was framed to potential donors, who had a limited understanding of the aims of the biobank. However, the article concludes that a lack of understanding on the part of donors is not necessarily an ethical problem and that efforts to re-think informed consent guidelines may benefit from paying greater attention to the factors that motivate people to donate in the first place.

The great ambivalence: factors likely to affect service user and public acceptability of the pharmacogenomics of antidepressant medication.

Whilst antidepressant medications are widely used, they are ineffective for nearly 40 per cent of users and cause numerous adverse drug reactions. The pharmacogenomics of depression attempts to better understand the role of genetic variation in antidepressant metabolism in the hope of improving drug efficacy and tolerability. In this paper we present findings from a series of focus groups with the general public and with mental health service users in four European sites. Results indicate broad support for genome-based therapies for depression. Findings, however, also show a wide spread of ambivalence regarding the nature and causes of depression, as well as the use of antidepressant medication. We argue that these uncertainties may negatively impact public and user acceptability of the pharmacogenomics of antidepressants.

Recasting subjectivity through the lenses: new forms of environmental mobilisation in China

Visual imagery in environmental politics can be an effective way to engage the public. However, research based on 21 interviewees with activists from nine environmental non-governmental organisations (ENGOs) in China suggests that the value of images in promoting environmental initiatives is not limited to the exhibition of them, but is also seen in the making of them. Increasingly in China, ENGOs are offering free natural photographic tutoring to the public. Camera lenses are seen as conduits to recast self-nature relations, which has the potential to raise environmental awareness and promote ENGO membership. Drawing on both theories of social movements and contemporary Chinese subaltern political sociology, this paper provides new insights into grass-roots environmental mobilisation in China.

Introduction: The Soft Power of Hard States

To what extent can authoritarian states wield soft power – the ability to shape the preferences of others through attraction rather than coercion – in their relations with other international actors? Over the past two decades authoritarian regimes across the world have increasingly embraced the idea of soft power. Yet, as argued by Joseph Nye (2013), their efforts to harness the ‘power of attraction’ are highly unlikely to bring any meaningful results. Looking at China’s and Russia’s soft power initiatives, Nye suggests that Moscow and Beijing simply ‘don’t get’ what soft power is about. In his view, soft power, with its roots in a vibrant civil society and an attractive political culture, is incompatible with authoritarian regimes. Although Nye’s piece focused on China and Russia, his neo-liberal conceptualisation of soft power is also applicable to authoritarian regimes in Africa and Latin America. In Nye’s view, a country cannot successfully wield soft power until it unleashes the full talents of its civil societies.

Chinese Cultural Diplomacy: Old Wine in New Bottles?

One way of considering the stunning transformation China has undergone is to look at the plight of Confucius over the past century. ‘Smash Confucianism’ was a common slogan of the May Fourth Movement, in which Chinese demonstrated against not only foreign powers but also the weakness of its own government which consistently caved in to them. The rationale behind the anti-Confucian movement could be found in the reformers’ iconoclastic drive to rid China from the traditions which were seen as holding it back from modernity. Later, Mao, in his 1940 essay ‘On New Democracy’, made clear his opposition to the ‘worship’ and study of Confucius, a hostility which culminated during the Cultural Revolution in various campaigns to destroy Confucian symbols, criticize ‘old’ cultural institutions, and question figures of authority — a habit forbidden under the Confucian value of filial piety.1

The pharmacogenomics of depression: mapping the social and ethical impact

Depressive disorders are a focus of growing social and economic concern. While antidepressant medications are widely accepted, they are ineffective for nearly 40% of users, and cause numerous adverse drug reactions. The pharmacogenomics of depression attempts to better understand the role of genetic variation in antidepressant metabolism in the hope of improving drug efficacy and tolerability. However, the development and delivery of genome‐based antidepressants face many hurdles. In this paper we provide an overview of the potential impact of the pharmacogenomics of depression on public mental health care by focusing on the social and ethical issues at stake. These include questions about genetic testing, informed consent, drug access, and market fragmentation. We end the paper with a brief discussion of the wider context and how the pharmacogenomics of depression relates to broader trends in psychiatry and biomedicine.

Autoethnography as Pedagogy: Writing the “I” in IR

While autoethnography has established itself as a research method, its utility in the classroom remains underexplored. Many writers use autoethnography to describe their roles as educators and students but far fewer detail an actual autoethnographic course. I analyze a highly original MA-level class on autoethnography in international relations. Students report that the course had the “potential to revolutionize” learning and teaching as a means of questioning themselves in relation to the social and political worlds they studied. Autoethnography has transformed the way we approach ourselves and our research; it is now time we let it change how we teach.

The transformative power of commoning and alternative food networks

ABSTRACT A commoning framework offers a critical lens to fully appreciate the scope and impact of alternative food networks (AFNs). Fieldwork from an AFN in southern China is drawn upon to show how commoning enacts changes in how members contextualise and anchor their social relations to one another with regards to sourcing food as a commons. A commoning framework gives a fuller picture of how the constitutive effects of AFNs reside not in their introduction of a new uniformity but in their navigation of the multiplicity of the social through its proposition and co-construction of a new ‘cognitive praxis’.

The Geography of the Ocean: Knowing the Ocean as a Space

This volume aims to put oceans at the centre of geographical discourse. Published as part of Routledge’s ‘Studies in Historical Geography’ series, and based originally on a PhD thesis at Exeter, it makes a highly useful contribution to the literature on the social construction of the oceans. In defining her study, the author adopts the term ‘oceanspace’ from Phillip Steinberg to ‘capture both the specificity of the world ocean and the fluidity between the study of landward and seaward domains, as both are socially and physically linked’ (1999, pp.367–368). The term signals Laloë’s concern with the oceanspace’s own physical characteristics as opposed to its subjection to terrestrial protocols of measuring and distributing surfaces. In other words, the focus here is on the ocean itself with its ‘physical attributes, wavering surface, tidal rhythms and unbounded connectivity and what these things means for human and nonhuman interrelations within it, which are rarely at the centre of human geographers work’ (p.1). In line with this, the author is careful to set her work apart from maritime history which, in her view, tends to focus on how humans have exploited, governed and navigated the oceans. The author relies on extensive archival and historical material, connecting small, local stories about how we have come to ‘know’ the oceans with a broader epistemological concern for how knowledge is produced, and how it travels across time and place. This diachronic approach is employed across three time frames: the ‘discoveries’ of the Americas, the growth of scientific knowledge in the Enlightenment and technological attempts to know the deep sea and seabed. The book is concerned with the World Ocean as the author wishes to consolidate the notion that there is no natural way to divide up the ocean-space based on its physicality. Yet the examples are heavily focused on the Atlantic Ocean. Nonetheless, each case advances Laloë’s goal of understanding how the ocean-space has been negotiated as a geographical space. Much of the narrative is driven by the relationship between science, culture and knowledge production. In the Age of Discovery, for example, the author shows how at the start of the sixteenth century, the Atlantic ocean-space emerged as both a physical space and discursive idea. The discovery of the Americas led to a new model of the world’s oceans and of the Earth’s size, away from widely accepted biblical tripartite understandings. While this is well known, Laloë’s contribution is in demonstrating how the process and nature of knowing the Atlantic triggered a wider revolution in knowledge production where evidence, sight and sound became central. This led to the Enlightenment enterprise of turning the Atlantic into a ‘fact’ through such things as the invention of the chronometer, the measuring of magnetic fields and the study of sea currents and wind. Critical to the inquiry is how social and cultural factors impacted the acceptability, or not, of these new understandings. Laloë uses the example of Matthew Maury’s work on large-scale water movements to explore how communication networks helped give his ideas legitimacy amongst sailors and merchants, aiding the interests of European empires. However, and much to her credit, the author is careful throughout the book to bring the discussion back to the water – that is, back to ocean-space itself and the ways in which its physical characteristics actively shape our interaction with it. This book will appeal to those interested in the oceans and maritime studies, as well as cartographers and human geographers more broadly. Although issues of climate change are not addressed, the book is also relevant for those concerned with environmental degradation and its impact on marine life and human well-being. The author hints at this in her call to relocate the ocean-space globally within a connected and interdependent system. Laloë certainly aims for a wide audience given her desire to put the ocean-space at the heart of the discipline. To this end, she usefully charts where future work may lie. She notes, for example, that her focus on scientific enterprise is partial and that greater attention to cultural expressions of the ocean-space in literature and art could provide a necessary correction to works which treat the oceans as backdrops rather than protagonists. As is, there is plenty to dwell on and appreciate in this volume. It is clearly written and accessible to non-specialists, without losing detail or complexity.

Earth governance: trusteeship of the global commons, by Klaus Bosselmann, Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Publishing, 2015, ix + 300 pp., index, £85.00 (hardback), ISBN 9781783477814

gical time as part of a broader modernizing dynamics of western cultures (Michael Northcott and Yves Cochet, respectively), and what Jean-Baptiste Fressoz argues has been a process of ‘losing the Earth knowingly’ through modes of thought (e.g. economics) that have become disconnected from – even uninterested in – the material basis of production. The challenges of the Anthropocene can hardly be overstated, and Biermann tackles them in full acknowledgement that his proposals would be perhaps the biggest overhaul of multilateralism since the UN was created. It is a call to reform – in the original sense of taking a new form – institutions that seek the consent of the governed in full view of the conditions under which global governance must now proceed. Echoing the need to face the Anthropocene in its fullest sense, Isabelle Stengers offers a thought-provoking chapter in which she argues, drawing a nuanced distinction between notions of Gaia and declarations of the Anthropocene, that the positioning of scientific, public and private networks must be faced in their totality, and for the often very different ways in which they come to understand reality. Her argument both sounds out the ways in which different networks decamp from complexity into their preferred silos, and calls for a renewed urgency to rethink precisely the movements and materials that shape responses to the Anthropocene. These two books call attention to numerous critical dimensions of environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Whether through a careful appraisal of existing institutions and their prospects for renewal, or academic and political thinking to pace the geological accelerations that human impacts now warrant, both are recommended as environmental politics enters a new epoch. Perhaps the most startling and shared feature of these books is the paucity of space and attention given to the many postcolonial and de-colonial voices that demand to be heard before geology is wielded to shape global institutions. These voices, along with the many forms of secular society that have emerged in reference to religions other than Christianity, must certainly be given more place – arguably priority – in environmental politics in the Anthropocene.