Sapientia
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SPEAKING Biotech: An ethnography of communication at a conference on biomedical applications of new biotechnologies
Publication . Pinto da Costa, José Carlos
The discursiveness of digital health and precision medicine taking place at the confluence of the positions of the developers of the biotechnologies, the medical applications of these technologies and the reactions of the public establishes and stabilizes the final form of precision medicine’s socio-technological alignment matrix. Hence, the analysis of this discursive alignment process, which is largely designed by the debate at conferences, is of pivotal importance for the understanding of current biomedicine. Realizing the importance of this discursiveness construction for the final expression of future healthcare practices, I conducted an analysis of the discourses produced through the various communications that were presented at an international congress on the applications of biotechnologies in biomedicine. This paper aims to present some outcomes of such analysis.
Not so elementary, my dear Watson: a critical anthropology essay on eHealth and precision medicine’s discourses
Publication . Pinto da Costa, José Carlos
“eHealth” and “Precision Medicine” are two major concepts in the new medical discourse. There are several signs of the implementation of a public policy generated around them. In this paper I present some of these signs, starting from the experience of attending a course on digital health and precision medicine directed to train leaders in this area. The reflection on the effects of these signals on populations and individuals’ lives suggests the presence of an ambivalence in the motivations that underpin the public policy discourse on eHealth and precision medicine which results as an overvaluation of health systems’ management economic aspects and an undervaluation of flexibility in healthcare providing resulting in a misadjustement to the necessarily ecological nature of individuals’ and populations’ lives.
Manufacturing biocitizens: the quantification of bodies as a method for incorporating a new biomedical ethics
Publication . Pinto da Costa, José Carlos
The quantification of bodies serves an ambivalent purpose in the political
economy of promise of new biomedicine. On the one hand, it includes individuals
in a new biopolitical norm, making them co-producers of new healthcare-related
sociotechnical imaginaries; on the other, it urges them to explore and to overcome
the deepest natural norms, distinguishing them as apparently free self-enhancers
and creative developers of what Donna Haraway (2003) called naturecultures. By
monitoring, recording, and supplying biometric data, individuals are included in a
process for incorporating a new biomedical ethos, gradually taking on a new kind of
citizenship: biocitizenship. In this chapter, I reflect on the power such incorporation
has for transforming both individuals and society and advocate the need for making
a critical analysis of the practices of quantification of bodies, considering these as
elements of a biopolitical technology aimed at manufacturing biocitizens.
"O que estamos a fazer?": Ensaio sobre a economia política da promessa do novo imaginário biomédico
Publication . Pinto da Costa, José Carlos
Sheila Jasanoff identificou três questões fundamentais que poderão interferir na coprodução dos futuros no contexto da economia política da promessa: a predominância de organizações privadas na articulação e propagação dos imaginários; a existência de tensões sobre a definição dos futuros desejáveis; e a qualidade dos imaginários enquanto tradutores dos entendimentos de uma sociedade sobre o bem e o mal. No presente ensaio reflete-se sobre as implicações da economia política da promessa da nova biomedicina na produção dos futuros imaginados analisando-se estas três questões através de uma abordagem cosmopolítica, à imagem da célebre proposta feita por Isabelle Stengers, isto é, partindo-se da indagação: “o que é que estamos a fazer?”.
Reunindo mundos: Algumas considerações sobre a integração da antropologia em projetos colaborativos sobre medicina personalizada
Publication . Pinto da Costa, José Carlos
Para estudar os efeitos da medicina personalizada (MP) nos cuidados de saúde, o antropólogo necessita de captar os modos de saber e de fazer dos experts e analisar os seus reflexos na sociedade. Em termos metodológicos, surgem aqui duas questões: Que características deve ter uma etnografia para captar e descrever os modos de conhecer e fazer dos experts da MP?; Que processos deverão ser dinamizados para analisar antropologicamente os reflexos desses modos na sociedade em geral? O propósito deste artigo é refletir sobre a hipótese de a participação em projetos colaborativos poder fornecer as condições para a realização de tal empreendimento.