The Department of Sociology presents:

Steven Epstein

Inclusion and Difference: Gender, Race, and the New

Biopolitics of Medical Research

Various US advocates, experts, and policymakers have sought in recent decades to reform medical research by making it more inclusive--principally by including more women, racial and ethnic minorities, children, and the elderly as research subjects. In this presentation, I describe how this distinctive way of thinking about bodies, identities, and differences gained supporters, took institutional form as law and policy, and become converted into common sense. I also consider some of its many consequences (intended and otherwise) for biomedical research, pharmaceutical drug development, "profiling" practices in health care, and scientific and cultural understandings of the meanings of sex and race. While defending certain aspects of the "inclusion-and-difference paradigm," I argue that its emphasis on understanding group differences in biological terms makes it a problematic tool for addressing health inequalities.

Steven Epstein is Professor of Sociology and Director of the Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. His book Impure Science: AIDS, Activism, and the Politics of Knowledge (1996) was awarded the C. Wright Mills Prize by the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the Robert K. Merton Prize by the American Sociological Association, and the Rachel Carson Prize by the Society for Social Studies of Science. His recent book Inclusion: The Politics of Difference in Medical Research (2007), charts the rise and assesses the consequences of new ways of managing difference (especially gender and race) within biomedical research in the United States. He is currently working on an NIH-funded, qualitative study of “sexual migration” that analyzes the sexual identities and risk practices of gay Mexican men who choose to migrate to San Diego at least in part for reasons connected to their sexual identity. In relation to this group, Dr. Epstein is studying the formation of “immigrant sexual citizenship.”

Wednesday, March 12, 2008

12:00 noon

Ellison Hall 2824