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Paper short abstract

We examine how people with a rare and progressive genetic condition navigate the moral and existential aspects of reproductive decision-making, including the question under which circumstances they would want to have a child with their own genetic condition.

Paper long abstract

In recent decades, the life expectancy of people with chronic genetic conditions such as cystic fibrosis (CF) has increased dramatically. In this evolving healthcare landscape, more and more people are considering parenthood as a realistic option for the future. This situation provides a useful lens through which to re-examine the 'expressivist objection' (EO), which posits that testing and selecting against potential offspring with genetic conditions could cause moral harm by reducing individuals with these conditions to their genetics. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in Germany and teh US, we examine how people with CF navigate the moral and existential aspects of reproductive decision-making, including the question under which circumstances they would want to have a child with their own genetic condition. We propose reframing the debate around the EO by opening up discussions about intergenerational responsibilities between parents and children with genetic conditions, and discussing people's attitudes toward genetic testing in relation to their own experiences with receiving support.

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This study analyzes interviews (n=15) and social media to trace how Chinese migrants in France navigate pelvic exams. While clinician empathy eases pain, fragmented administration causes friction. I argue screening is a moral practice, urging "screening otherwise" via user-centric pathways.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines cervical screening (Pap smears and HPV tests) as a socio-technical testing practice, asking how Chinese migrant women in France navigate, postpone, or avoid testing. In France, screening is organised as routine prevention through reminders, reimbursement rules, and platforms such as Doctolib. For many women from mainland China, it is a first encounter with the vaginal exam and the speculum; expectations are shaped in advance by family stories, peer advice, and Xiaohongshu, a Chinese social media platform.

Based on ongoing fieldwork in Paris (15 semi-structured interviews with Chinese migrant women aged 18–40) and a Xiaohongshu corpus (≈50 posts collected via keyword searches), I trace narratives from deciding to book to the exam and results. Trust is not simply the absence of pain: when clinicians explain each step and make it clear that patients can pause or stop, discomfort becomes easier to name and manage. Yet the administrative chain of prevention, characterized by unclear costs, automated follow-up, fragmented information, and long waits, can also feel cold and stressful.

Faced with these frictions, women develop strategies: requesting a female clinician, relying on “how-to” knowledge, and seeking Chinese-language resources. By foregrounding hesitation and refusal, I argue that screening is a moral practice that makes migrant bodies into evaluable risks while inviting women to become “responsible” subjects of prevention. I close by discussing what “screening otherwise” could mean from users’ points of view: clearer explanations, more accessible pathways, and clinic routines that reduce the work of navigating prevention.

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This paper asks how different “testing logics” shaped Austria’s pandemic governance. Based on ongoing fieldwork, we trace policymakers’ and experts’ understandings of how, why, and by whom tests should be used when negotiating the biopolitical mandate to secure and enhance life beyond the clinic.

Paper long abstract

Testing for SARS-CoV-2 infections played a prominent role in pandemic governance, constituting the biggest global testing effort to date. With the second-highest per capita test rate worldwide and the costs of roughly 208 million tests covered by the Health Ministry, Austria had a substantial share in this global testing program. This paper examines policymakers and experts’ normative ideas about how, why, and by whom tests ought to be used. We conceptualize these understandings of reasonable and unreasonable testing as “testing logics,” informed by specific ways of deploying tests and (e)valuating them. We argue that situated practices of using tests bring forth different states of infection and interpretations of the biopolitical mandate. Based on ongoing data collection through semi-structured expert interviews and document analysis, we trace how tests were used to secure and enhance life beyond traditional clinical and public health logics. Analyzing how testing mediated relationships between authorities and citizens or between epidemiologically in/secure bodies, we show how biomedical testing was configured otherwise. We examine how these testing logics entered into conflict and conversation throughout the pandemic, exploring moments when competing testing logics were aligned and others when they generated friction. By zooming in on more-than-diagnostics test uses, we contribute to research on the relationship between testing practices, states of infections, and enactments of the biopolitical mandate in the governance of disease outbreaks.

[SARS-CoV-2 testing; Austria; biopolitics; pandemic governance]

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This paper compares laboratory tests and real-world data (RWD) as epistemic practices. It asks how RWD stabilizes knowledge through cleaning, purification, and signal/noise separation, and how health policy links testing and RWD infrastructures.

Paper long abstract

The creation of medicals test was a significant outcome of particular types of laboratory research. The lab created conditions that involved a stabilization of the world, by cleaning it, purifying it, until specific elements could be controlled and verified. When tests emanated from this work, testing methodologies became boundary objects that could travel out of the research laboratory and allow pathogens in the world to travel back into clinical laboratories. In medicine, the randomized clinical trial (RCT) was later invented to also make pharmaceutical effects testable in populations. While STS have partly lost interest in the laboratory, tests and RCTs have also become taken-for-granted epistemic objects among health policymakers. The buzz is now about real-world data (RWD), which could be said to be about exploring all that the structured methodologies of tests and RCTs could not capture. European policymakers currently invest billions of euros in establishing infrastructures for RWD exploration. How do laboratory tests and RWD science compare? How do people in RWD settings work with cleaning and purification to stabilize knowledge objects? How do they stabilize the world and make it fit their models? How do they separate noise from signal? And what is the social fate of clinical test results in this emerging environment? With point of departure in these questions, I wish to reflect on the RWD as a new arena for STS work on the purification and stabilization practices once associated with the development of the test.

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This paper examines how Covid-19 testing in Austrian schools became a political, moral, and administrative problem during the pandemic. Drawing on the concept of problematization it treats testing as as an object whose meaning, necessity, and legitimacy had to be continuously constructed.

Paper long abstract

The study is looking at how Covid-19 testing in schools was defined regarding what testing was used for, how it was organized and why it was needed. This shows how meaning and importance of Covid-19 testing changed over time and why.

It is based on two types of data. First a detailed timeline on Covid-19 testing in Austrian Schools, based on newspaper reports and official announcements and secondly interviews with important and highly responsible politicians from the educational sector. These two sources together show how different ideas about Covid-19 testing in school shaped decisions.

Three main kinds of problem definitions appear. Ontological problems show how actors describe what a Covid-19 test in different situations and at different times during the Covid-19 pandemic was. The moral dimension covers different responsibilities regarding testing and how these shifted. And on the administrative side the study shows how testing was carried out, which infrastructure had to be created for that and by whom.

Moreover, it shows that the idea of preparedness is behind the implementation of testing in schools, since tests have represented a safety measure that demonstrates how schools have prepared for the pandemic, enabling them to monitor risks and react quickly and effectively.

The study argues that crisis governance shapes, and is shaped by, public and political debate. It makes a valuable contribution to the Science and Technology Studies (STS) discussion on preparedness, demonstrating how problematisation can be employed to analyse such processes.

Keywords:

Problematisation

Preparedness

Covid-19 School Testing

STS

Crisis Governance

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Paper short abstract

Our paper discusses the gap between gathering biological data and interpreting it into clinically relevant insights in the case of insomnia, and how hypnotic drugs have stepped in to occupy this gap. We draw on 83 in-depth interviews with individuals in Uruguay who reported sleep difficulties.

Paper long abstract

In this paper, we discuss the role of polisomnography in cases of insomnia disorder from a situated perspective. Polysomnography has been considered the gold standard to assess sleep, however its usefulness in cases of insomnia remains unclear. While some say that it should not be used to diagnose insomnia (e.g. American Academy of Family Physicians, n.d.), others have included it in a clinical trial to evaluate the efficacy of a novel drug for the treatment of insomnia (e.g. Mignot et al., 2022). How has such a contradiction in the medical field been translated into the patients’ experience?

In our fieldwork, carried out in Montevideo (Uruguay), we interviewed a total of 83 people who reported having sleep problems. Only three of the interviewees reported undergoing a polysomnography and none of them reported any benefit from the test or any change in pharmacological treatment influenced by the results. Moreover, in most of the interviewees, insomnia was not diagnosed using any type of technology, and many did not even receive an accurate diagnosis of their sleep problems.

Such a panorama has exposed the gap between gathering biological data and interpreting it into clinically relevant insights. In the case of sleep, considering the widespread prevalence of sleep difficulties and the mainstream medical discourses around sleep as a biological matter, hypnotic drugs have stepped in to occupy this gap as the technoscientific response that displaces the necessity of a formal diagnosis.

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This abstract examines data work underlying antibiotic susceptibility testing in a microbiology lab as sociomaterial practice in a resource-constrained Indian public hospital. It highlights epistemic, infrastructural, and political/moral data work through which evidence is generated and legitimized.

Paper long abstract

Biomedical testing is often framed as a standardized intervention for improving antimicrobial resistance (AMR) diagnostics. However, Science and Technology Studies (STS) scholarship shows tests are not simply implemented but must be enacted through situated practices, infrastructure repair, and political/moral negotiations. In resource-constrained settings, challenges lie not only in performing tests but also in creating and sustaining conditions that make testing possible. Rather than treating antibiotic susceptibility testing (AST) as laboratory protocols, this paper conceptualizes AST as a sociomaterial accomplishment shaping knowledge and clinical futures.

The paper draws on a longitudinal STS-informed study (2021-2025) establishing and operating a culture-based microbiology laboratory in a secondary public hospital in northern India serving migrant and low-income populations. The study draws on documentation of testing practices, laboratory work, record-keeping, and clinician-laboratory-patient interactions to understand work that makes testing possible.

The analysis identifies three interrelated forms of data work: epistemic, involving interpretation and judgment under contamination risk, diagnostic delay, and uneven clinical trust; infrastructural, including maintenance, repair, spatial improvisation, and adaptation to space limitations, unstable electricity, inadequate water supply, equipment breakdowns, and fragile data systems; and political-moral, through which laboratory staff negotiate standards, reporting formats, clinical relevance, patient expectations, and accountability.

The paper argues that AST not only produces diagnostic knowledge but reshapes clinical futures by reorganizing prescribing practices, evidentiary trust, and care pathways. Understanding biomedical testing as sociomaterial practice is essential for reimagining equitable diagnostic futures in resource-limited health systems.

Keywords

Antibiotic susceptibility testing; Antimicrobial resistance; Biomedical testing; Resource-constrained health systems; Science and Technology Studies

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Paper short abstract

We explore ambivalence around emerging technologies of multi-cancer testing, situating these tests within a changing landscape of anticipation of cancer. We highlight a paradox: knowing more through testing can exacerbate uncertainty, extending the 'not-yet' of cancer.

Paper long abstract

Political commitments about cancer have produced a boom in cancer diagnostics. Multi-cancer tests (MCTs), which detect signals of several cancers simultaneously, are heralded as the next breakthrough in cancer detection. We situate this technological shift in what Andersen (2023) describes as a change the anticipation of cancer, in the temporal and social experience of living with the possibility of cancer before formal diagnosis is made. We conceptualise testing as an anticipatory practice that carries expectations of the future, driven by hopes for managing, mitigating, or preventing possible future harms. We use the idea of haunting to describe how cancer testing brings the past, the absent, or the not-yet into the present (Derrida. 1993). We report on speculative workshops in the UK where healthcare professionals and lab staff described how they imagined MCTs could impact their practice. Discussions illustrated the haunting presence of cancer in healthcare encounters. A utopia was where testing provided a reliable insight into the absence or presence of cancer, with new knowledge easily aligning with existing cancer detection infrastructures. Dystopia was a perpetuation of the not-yet of cancer, chasing signals with no fixed referent in the body, or generating information that contradicted existing knowledge sources. We reflect on the potential of MCTs to amplify anticipation of cancer. Paradoxically knowing more through testing could generate further uncertainty, as multiple signals multiply the work of making cancer absent. We contribute to exploration of the disconnect between policy drivers of testing and the lived ambivalence of testing-in-practice.

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Paper short abstract

Originating in communities with a high prevalence of genetic conditions, the contemporary use of 'genetic compatibility' promotes universal preconception testing through responsibilisation of prospective parents, normalising identifying and acting on genetic risk.

Paper long abstract

Over the last 15 years, expanded carrier screening (ECS) has emerged as a technique for prospective parents to identify their joint likelihood of transmitting a large number of disease-causing recessive genes to their future children. It is only available commercially in the UK, though offered in some countries through their public health service. This paper examines the framing of ECS in the online marketing materials of fertility and genetics clinics, specifically, the deployment of the term ‘genetic compatibility’ in three routes to pregnancy: unassisted conception, assisted conception and donor conception.

Through a thematic analysis of web content, we show that ‘genetic compatibility’ is used to position ECS as a preconception test for everyone planning conception, promoting universal genetic surveillance (Petersen and Pienaar, 2021). Normalising that “everyone is a carrier” can make a positive result appear commonplace, while framing the 2–4% of couples with a positive result as 'incompatible' misrepresents the outcome as at-risk or not-at-risk, rather than at an increased risk. ECS then serves as an avenue for medicalising and responsibilising prospective parents before conception has even occurred (Waggoner, 2017).

We argue that presenting ECS in this way is a form of reproductive governance of preconception couples, holding both partners jointly responsible for the health of their future children. The expectation to anticipate risks compels preconception risk management, where risk is read not only into routine activities such as eating and exercise, but materialised through the normalisation of genetic testing, and the evasive action expected if results are positive.

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Paper short abstract

Taking a historical perspective, the paper draws on three instances of testing in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Greece. It explores socio-technical and political implications of testing, by focusing on distinct appropriations of tests, acknowledging the infrastructural dynamics.

Paper long abstract

Taking a historical perspective, this paper draws on three instances of uses of testing in the context of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in Greece. It analyses public discourses surrounding the appropriations of tests, as well as the infrastructural dynamics associated with testing regimes. Given the growing research in STS and related fields on the complexities of (bio)medical testing, it explores socio-technical and political implications of testing in healthcare (Petersen & Pienaar, 2021). The first aim of the paper is to identify moments of ambiguity between testing and screening practices. The second is to reflect on contestations connected to public health objectives and testing realities. The third is to consider the visibility (and mobility) of tests as public technologies that enact different public health values.

By focusing on distinct appropriations of tests over a 25-year period, the paper analyses three episodes that illustrate contestations over interpretations of tests and testing. The first episode examines debates surrounding the use of early anti-HIV tests to understand and manage the HIV/AIDS outbreak in Greece (1985-1988), highlighting tensions between testing and screening logics. The second episode, in 2006, concerns a moment of public health triggered by the public disclosure of two transfusion-transmitted HIV infections, when the absence of nucleic acid test (NAT) in routine blood screening became the central issue of public controversy. Τhe third episode, in 2012, concerns the compulsory HIV testing of women who were violently detained in police custody following police raids in Athens (formally associated with illicit sex-work and trafficking).

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Paper short abstract

Tracing PGT from diagnosis to screening, this paper analyzes how a reproductive test acquires shifting ontologies, moralities, and legitimacy. Combining literature review and ethnography in Spain, it examines how PGT-A and emerging PGT-P reconfigure embryos, risk, and reproductive responsibility.

Paper long abstract

Over the past four decades, preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) has undergone a profound transformation. Initially introduced in the early 1990s as a diagnostic technique to prevent the transmission of severe monogenic diseases, it has gradually evolved into a set of screening technologies aimed at managing reproductive risk and optimizing IVF outcomes. This paper offers a genealogy of PGT in order to examine how the same biomedical test comes to embody multiple ontologies, moralities, and forms of legitimacy across different moments of its development.

Combining a historical and theoretical analysis of secondary literature with ethnographic research conducted in IVF clinics in Spain, the paper traces the shift from diagnosis to screening with the rise of PGT for Aneuploidy (PGT-A). While initially framed as a tool to improve implantation rates, PGT-A has generated persistent scientific controversies regarding its clinical effectiveness and ethical implications. Yet the test has nevertheless become routinized in some reproductive markets.

The paper then examines the emergence of polygenic embryo screening (PGT-P) as an extension—and in some respects a radicalization—of these dynamics. By evaluating embryos according to probabilistic polygenic risk scores for complex diseases, PGT-P expands the logic of selection beyond chromosomal abnormalities toward broader forms of genomic optimization.

The paper explores how PGT circulates across clinical practices, regulatory frameworks, and reproductive markets, producing different meanings and moral expectations. In doing so, it contributes to the study of biomedical testing by showing how diagnostic technologies reshape embryos, patients, and reproductive futures through shifting regimes of knowledge, governance, and responsibility.