Just Biomedicine is a UC Santa Cruz-based research collective that examines the meeting of biomedicine, biotechnology, and big data along the Third Street corridor in the Mission-Bay neighborhood of San Francisco. Many hope that this convergence will democratize access to health information and produce revolutionary new medical treatments that new companies will make available to the public through market mechanisms. Yet, as in other domains, living with technoscientific transformations over time reveals how they produce new inequalities and injustices: new challenges to democratic governance; new surveillance regimes; and new forms of social stratification. These often-hidden justice dimensions can be hard to visualize and hard to stand up for.  This is especially the case in the biomedical informatic domain, where criticism of specific developments can be interpreted as standing against developments in healthcare more generally. Nonetheless, stratified health and wealth outcomes manifest at this celebrated innovative edge of technoscience.  The Just Biomedicine collective seeks to understand and bring into view how this happens in the spaces and infrastructures that shape life on Third Street, and asks how we might help bring about a more just form of biomedicine.

Contact

Jenny Reardon (Sociology), Dennis Browe (Graduate student, Sociology)

Key Faculty

Jenny Reardon (Sociology), Katherine Weatherford Darling (Sociology, University of Maine)

Graduate Student Researchers

Dennis Browe is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at UC Santa Cruz. Dennis’ work lies at the intersections of medical sociology, science & technology studies (STS), public health, sexuality and gender studies, and feminist theory.

Andy Murray is a recent graduate of UC Santa Cruz, with a PhD in Sociology and a designated emphasis in Anthropology. Andy specializes in the qualitative study of biological and biomedical science and technology and has multiple publications in peer-reviewed formats with a focus on moral and ethical dimensions of emerging biotechnologies.

Undergraduate Researcher Alumni

Wessede Barrett, Emily Caramelli, Amy Coffin, Hannah Finegold, Laura Lopez, Emma Mitchell-Sparke (Tufts University), Nikobi Petronelli

Funders

IDEA Hub

Links

Grad Book Launch – Counterpoints: Bay Area Data and Stories for Resisting Displacement

“Stratified Health” map prototype (credit: Emily Caramelli)