Taming Time: Configuring Cancer Patients as Research Subjects
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Taming Time : Configuring Cancer Patients as Research Subjects. / Bogicevic, Ivana; Svendsen, Mette N.
In: Medical Anthropology Quarterly, Vol. 35, No. 3, 2021, p. 386-401.Research output: Contribution to journal › Journal article › Research › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Taming Time
T2 - Configuring Cancer Patients as Research Subjects
AU - Bogicevic, Ivana
AU - Svendsen, Mette N.
PY - 2021
Y1 - 2021
N2 - This article explores how incurable cancer patients in the affluent Danish welfare state are recruited to clinical trials. We show that patients' impending death constitutes their potential for being configured as research subjects. To produce valuable data, patients who enroll in trials and health care professionals must engage in daily "time practices" that prolong the threshold between life and death. When death becomes inevitable, the limit of configuring dying cancer patients as research subjects is reached. Navigating this temporal logic, health care professionals balance the boundary between patients' instrumental worth as research subjects and their intrinsic worth as dying cancer patients. Whereas previous studies have critically uncovered how clinical trials operate at socioeconomic margins, we point to the ways in which clinical trials operate through temporal margins. We argue that clinical trials are dependent on configuring marginal societal spaces and marginal bodies from which to produce knowledge.
AB - This article explores how incurable cancer patients in the affluent Danish welfare state are recruited to clinical trials. We show that patients' impending death constitutes their potential for being configured as research subjects. To produce valuable data, patients who enroll in trials and health care professionals must engage in daily "time practices" that prolong the threshold between life and death. When death becomes inevitable, the limit of configuring dying cancer patients as research subjects is reached. Navigating this temporal logic, health care professionals balance the boundary between patients' instrumental worth as research subjects and their intrinsic worth as dying cancer patients. Whereas previous studies have critically uncovered how clinical trials operate at socioeconomic margins, we point to the ways in which clinical trials operate through temporal margins. We argue that clinical trials are dependent on configuring marginal societal spaces and marginal bodies from which to produce knowledge.
KW - clinical trials
KW - cancer
KW - human subjects
KW - research ethics
KW - temporality
U2 - 10.1111/maq.12647
DO - 10.1111/maq.12647
M3 - Journal article
C2 - 33866608
VL - 35
SP - 386
EP - 401
JO - Medical Anthropology Quarterly
JF - Medical Anthropology Quarterly
SN - 0745-5194
IS - 3
ER -
ID: 260994484