Value Practices in the Life Sciences and Medicine - Tapa dura

People's and societies' values arent fixed and innate. They are forged in practice,in every day settings, and often as the result of conflict. This important new book focusses on exactly how this happens. (Donald MacKenzie, Professor of Sociology, University of Edinburgh)

In spite of routine attempts to neatly separate facts from values in the course of debates and controversies, decades of work in the field of Science & Technology Studies have led to the increasing recognition that these two components are closely intertwined. This insight, however, has more often than not been used as a starting point for analyzing the production of facts, taking values for granted. This volume addresses this glaring imbalance. Recognizing that values are the outcome, not the cause, of valuation practices, and following up on recent calls to shift attention from matters of fact to matters of concern, the authors of this collection, in their own distinctive ways, explore how different kinds of values are generated, modified, performed, assembled, and articulated with epistemic matters in a variety of settings. (Alberto Cambrosio, Professor & Chair, Department of Social Studies of Medicine, McGill University)

Life sciences are saturated with value talks. This book provides insights into practices, and devices, through which what matters, how and to whom, are shaped and dealt with in a variety of sites. From a cod farm to healthcare markets, from algorithms allocating organs to be transplanted to clinical registry networks, it makes the reader literally sense that values do not stand out there, but are deeply ingrained in the making of life sciences. And this book does more: it offers an attractive program to the field of valuation studies, which hopefully, will come to fruition in the near future. (Vololona Rabeharisoa, Professor, Center for the Sociology of Innovation, Mines ParisTech)

The era of small government and big economy is a testing time for STS. Do we live in post-critical times? Maybe. Irrespective of our disagreements over the fate of skepticism, we need to grind new analytic lenses. This book, which helps us see that epistemic practices are a species of valuation practices, refracts valuing in new ways. (Helen Verran, Professor, Charles Darwin University)

Many deep concerns in the life sciences and medicine have to do with the enactment, ordering and displacement of a broad range of values. This volume articulates a pragmatist stance for the study of the making of values in society, exploring various sites within life sciences and medicine and asking how values are at play.

This means taking seriously the work scientists, regulators, analysts, professionals and publics regularly do, in order to define what counts as proper conduct in science and health care, what is economically valuable, and what is known and worth knowing.

A number of analytical and methodological means to investigate these concerns are presented. The editors introduce a way to indicate an empirically oriented research program into the enacting, ordering and displacing of values. They argue that a research programme of this kind, makes it possible to move orthogonally to the question of what values are, and thus ask how they are constituted. This rectifies some central problems that arise with approaches that depend on stabilized understandings of value. At the heart of it, such a research programme encourages the examination of how and with what means certain things come to count as valuable and desirable, how registers of value are ordered as well as displaced. It further encourages a sense that these matters could be, and sometimes simultaneously are, otherwise.