Having met Federica Lucivero and Barbara Prainsack at the Brocher Foundation in March, I have since joined them via Skype for their regular reading group on the ethical, legal, social and biopolitical issues related to Data and IT in Health and Medicine (DITinH&Me). The group has also started producing nuanced responses to official documents such as the WMA draft declaration on Ethical Considerations Regarding Health Databases and Biobanks (see here), and the UK’s Wellcome Trust’s report on Commercial access to health data (report here, Prainsack’s response here). They kindly invited me to speak with them informally last week in King’s, where we discussed how important concepts rising in my previous projects on intersection of ethics and science governance find new ethnographic spaces in the changing way that information is shared, and shaped into knowledge. I was reminded again of H. Tsoukas’s prescient essay (1997) on the temptations and paradoxes of the information society,  and left excited by the shape of possible research projects to come.

Read more from the group here Follow Social Science, Health and Medicine at Kings on Twitter @SSHMatKCL, where their by-line reads “Health is more than a Medical Matter” and carries the hashtags #GlobalHealth, #Bioethics, #Ageing and #SocialMedicine.