Call for Papers

4S 2016 (Barcelona, August 31 – September 3, 2016)

Pharmaceuticals out of Bounds

When birth control hormones are found in drinking water and fish in streams contain Prozac, it is time to acknowledge that pharmaceuticals have gone rogue. If illness is the “new normal” (Dumit 2012), then the bioactive materials that at once define, sustain, or assuage illness will inevitably escape the limits imagined in their usage scripts. What happens when pharmaceuticals overflow the boundaries imposed by regulatory structures, carrier materials, and places and methods of production? What new risks–to bodies and environments–appear in an increasingly pharmaceuticalized world? What new social lives do drugs take on when used outside of their usage scripts, after expiration, or when they are cut, mixed, and remade into new types of drugs?

We seek papers that interrogate what happens when pharmaceuticals go out of the bounds placed on them by science and society. Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to dag66@cornell.edu AND cspackman@g.hmc.edu by Sunday, February 14, 2016.

This panel is organized by the Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) section of the Society for Medical Anthropology, and will be submitted as a closed panel.