Department of Philosophy Faculty Publications
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Item Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma's Invisible Hands(Mattering Press, 2018-07-23) Sismondo, SergioHidden from the public view, the many invisible hands of the pharmaceutical industry and its agents channel streams of drug information and knowledge from contract research organizations to publication planners, key opinion leaders, patient advocacy organizations, and onward. The goal of this ‘assemblage marketing’ is to establish conditions that make specific diagnoses, prescriptions and purchases as obvious and frequent as possible. While staying in the shadows, companies create powerful markets in which increasing numbers of people become sick and the drugs largely sell themselves. Most agents for drug companies aim to tell the truth, but the truths they tell are drawn from streams of knowledge that have been fed, channeled and maintained by the companies at every possible opportunity. Especially because those companies have concentrated influence and narrow interests, consumers and others should be concerned about how epistemic power is distributed – or ‘political economies of knowledge’ – and not just about truth and falsity of medical knowledge. This work draws on presentations at industry conferences, especially ones where pharmaceutical companies interact with communication, marketing and other agencies. Participants at these interface conferences describe goals, practices and concerns; in the process, they reveal a lot about how the industry works. Some of the book’s other data is taken from publications that also serve as interfaces between the industry and adjacent actors, and from interviews with people engaged in pharmaceutical marketing.Item Posthumanist Education: Rethinking Human-Animal Relations in Teaching and Learning(2017-10-17) Pedersen, HelenaEducational institutions have traditionally privileged human perspectives and interests, while using animals as scientific objects or ‘resources’ for our teaching and learning, rather than as subjects in their own right. This lecture explores how human-animal relations take shape in a range of educational settings and discusses possibilities and visions for transforming education in a critical posthumanist direction.Item Linking Research and Marketing: A Pharmaceutical Innovation(2009-07-21T19:32:26Z) sismondo, SergioThis chapter describes in very general terms the integration of clinical research and marketing, drawing on books by marketers and recent cases that have come to the public eye. The tools that have been used to accomplish this integration over the past half-century are various, but they all stem from a realization that in a rational world centered on health there need be no intrinsic divide between research and marketing. Most obviously, marketing drugs to physicians, who are professionals acting within their own spheres, depends crucially on research. Physicians respond, and need to see themselves as responding, to fact, figures, and studies. The well-chosen images and vehicles for marketing campaigns must be subordinated to research. Yet at the same time research is a means of increasing sales.