Politics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and Stem: Among White Coats

Politics and Practices of the Ethnographies of Biomedicine and STEM: Among White Coats collects critical examinations of the politics, positionality, and epistemological and methodological issues of doing ethnography in a number of locales across the globe and in fields including computer science, astronomy, mining, biology, and medicine.

The book captures a wide breadth of ethnographic case studies conducted by scholars at different stages of their careers, with various geographical backgrounds, and working across different settings and regions of the world, demonstrating the unfolding of overlapping concerns in unique ways. ’Among White Coats’ is the first systematic and critical examination of the politics and epistemology of doing ethnography in biomedicine and STEM, adding to the extensive production of studies based on the ethnography of medicine and ethnography of science, as well as the ongoing debate on the foundation of ethnography. The book is geared toward academics and research students from different disciplinary backgrounds. It is a resource useful not only for students and Ph.D. candidates but also for expert ethnographers, presenting the most recent debates on ethnography and knowledge production in the STEM and biomedical fields. The book is partly a response to the growing awareness of the increasingly pertinent objective for ethnographers to reflect on their positionalities in their writing. Thus, this book offers a reflexive guide to thinking through the political and practical aspects of ethnographic practice.

Cinzia Greco is Wellcome Trust Fellow at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. As Medical Anthropologist, she has worked for more than ten years on ethnographic studies of medicine, with interests in cancer, medical innovation, inequalities in access to healthcare, and gender and health. She is Author of the forthcoming book Assemblages of cancer: Experiences and contexts of breast cancer in the UK, France and Italy andCo-editor of the ’New Chronicities’ special issue of Anthropology & Medicine, and her research has appeared in several journals, including Social Science & Medicine, Medical Anthropology, and Journal of Gender Studies.