P41 - Public Health Policies, Biomedicalized Publics, and Successful Societies
PANEL Organizers
• Felder Kay (kay.felder@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
• Felt Ulrike (ulrike.felt@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
• Penkler Michael (michael.penkler@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
SUMMARY
In light of discourses of global competition and fears that “the West” might lose its privileged status, desires for “healthy populations” and calls for improving public health can be seen as ramifications of the intertwinement of imaginations of a “good” and successful society with ideals of health and fitness. Many public health endeavors center on changing public behavior or raising risk awareness, like for example obesity prevention campaigns. At the same time as public health policies highlight certain diseases and set rules of conduct, they also determine the publics they want to address and discursively construct «a public» in need of protection. Normative understandings of (in)appropriate forms of living not only fuel desires for a «healthy» society, but also determine how society should look like. A major mode of ordering in public health is concerned with determining target groups. This ordering work is deeply political as it is tied to moral or scientific choices in defining categories, standards, and forms of inclusion and participation. Determining target groups is never a simple act of identifying pre-given groups, but plays a performative part in delineating and constructing these groups in the first place. The ways diseases and their publics are enacted not only comply to normative stands for catering to diverse forms of living and being, but also raise questions about the imagined relations between forms of publics and their policies, and the consequences these imaginations have. Aiming to connect the perspectives of Interpretative Policy Analysis and Science and Technology Studies and to compare cases, we invite participants of this panel to discuss how publics are constructed and bounded by public health policies. We want to reflect on how individual and collective identities are shaped in different national and health-related contexts, and on how through such processes of co-production power gets redistributed.
KEY WORDS
Health policy, publics, Science and Technology Studies
ROOM
Sciences Po Lille B2.13
SESSION 1 : 09/07/15 : 16:00-17:30
Chair: Michael Penkler (michael.penkler@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
• Boundary-work in Norwegian Policy on Welfare Technology. The Place of Welfare Technology In the Everyday Lives of the Elderly
Jenny M. Bergschöld (jenny.bergschold@ntnu.no), Norwegian University of Science and Technology (Norway)
• Shifting Contraceptive Policies in Light of Risk Assessment and Management. The French “Pill Scare” Case
Mylene Rouzaud-Cornabas (mylene.rouzaud-cornabas@inserm.fr), Centre de recherches en épidémiologie et santé des populations (France)
• Caring for Diversity. Making Differences in Obesity Prevention and Treatment
Ulrike Felt (ulrike.felt@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
Kay Felder (kay.felder@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
Michael Penkler (michael.penkler@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
SESSION 2 : 9/07/2015 : 17:45-19:15
Chair: Kay Felder (kay.felder@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
Discussant: Ulrike Felt (ulrike.felt@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
• Constructing Populations as Publics. Representation and Participation in Medical Research as Public Health Intervention
Erik Aarden (erik.aarden@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
• Organizing immunity: Vaccination against Human Papilloma Virus in Austria and the Netherlands
Paul Katharina (katharina.t.paul@univie.ac.at), University of Vienna (Austria)
Iris Wallenburg (wallenburg@bmg.eur.nl), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands)
Roland Bal (r.bal@bmg.eur.nl), Erasmus University Rotterdam (Netherlands)
