Substantial public and private investments have been funnelled into building the infrastructure of translational medicine which, according to proponents, offers huge potential for advances in health and for economic growth. Such potential, however, is predicated on a variety of labour practices. It is performed by many different categories of worker, from research nurses to data scientists, in various settings and locations. This labour is highly uneven, and often unnoticed or unseen by policymakers and the public. In this panel, we focus attention on the labour that facilitates and underpins translational medicine as a key feature of life sciences research and the bioeconomy.
We are keen to explore the ways in which labour is understood, organised, and valued—including interrogating the hierarchical and gendered arrangements within which various stratified forms of labour take place. We want to question how such structures enable some practices to be rendered invisible and devalued, while some are highly privileged, prestigious, and valuable. We are equally interested in exploring if and how variously situated categories of workers contribute to the production of knowledge through their support, administrative, or care practices.
We invite papers from various disciplinary, empirical and theoretical perspectives to question what it takes to produce valuable knowledge in contemporary translational medicine. This panel contributes to the growing body of STS scholarship on the bioeconomy and translational medicine, as well as literature exploring the constitutive role of care in the production of knowledge and value.