News

New briefing: COVID-19 antibody testing and ‘immunity certification’

New briefing: COVID-19 antibody testing and ‘immunity certification’

The Nuffield Council on Bioethics has published a policy briefing highlighting an urgent need for consideration of the ethical questions raised by COVID-19 antibody testing and immunity certification.

Antibody testing is currently being rolled out for research purposes but may offer a way to assess the risk of individuals being infected and transmitting the virus to others. It could also be used as the basis of a system of “immunity certification” or more complex risk profiling.

However, the prospect of “immunity certification” raises many ethical questions around respect for individual rights and interests and public health responsibilities and has wider societal implications. The negative impacts of certification are likely to fall disproportionately on those who are already socially marginalised and disadvantaged.

We believe there is an urgent need for public engagement and consideration of these complex ethical issues before further development of technologies and services based on antibody testing.
This briefing note summarises the key points of discussions at a multi-disciplinary expert meeting convened by the Nuffield Council on Bioethics on 24 April 2020.

With thanks to the meeting participants:
Chair: Professor Bobbie Farsides (Brighton & Sussex Medical School)
Professor Dr Steffen Augsberg (University of Giessen)
Victoria Butler-Cole QC (39 Essex Chambers)
Professor John Coggon (University of Bristol)
Professor Cam Donaldson (Glasgow Caledonian University)
Dr Jennie Evans (British Society for Immunology)
Dr Agamoni Ganguli-Mitra (University of Edinburgh)
Dr Carolina Haefliger (AstraZeneca)
Professor Jonathan Heeney (University of Cambridge)
Dr Stephen John (University of Cambridge)
Professor Jeffrey Kahn (Johns Hopkins University)
Professor Anne Kerr (University of Glasgow)
Dr Pete Mills (Nuffield Council on Bioethics)
Dr Alison Powell (LSE and Ada Lovelace Institute)
Professor Barbara Prainsack (University of Vienna and KCL)
Dr Julian Sheather (BMA and Médecins Sans Frontières)
Professor Effy Vayena (University of Zurich)
Professor Jantina de Vries (University of Cape Town)
Hugh Whittall (Nuffield Council on Bioethics)
Professor Karen Yeung (University of Birmingham)

Download the rapid policy briefing

New working paper by Lukas Schlögl: Leapfrogging into the unknown - The future of structural change in the developing world

New working paper by Lukas Schlögl: Leapfrogging into the unknown - The future of structural change in the developing world

This paper traces a set of major trends and future scenarios in global structural change. It argues that across multiple domains of change, developing economies are facing novel constellations of lateness and prematurity in technological and economic development.
The paper explores these novel constellations in employment and value added, global trade, and technological upgrading.

It argues that an expansion of service sector work in lockstep with rising economic development will likely continue to shape the medium-term future of structural transformation, albeit with trends of convergence and a hybridization of sectors.
New employment challenges may be emerging for participants in a global value chain due to the debated threat of ‘reshoring’ of offshored production.
The paper finally discusses automation in the non-tradable sector and the ramifications of technological leapfrogging or ‘technology creep’ for the future of structural change.

Find the Working Paper here

Nikolas Rose’s visit at CeSCoS

Nikolas Rose’s visit at CeSCoS

From 9-13 December 2020 we had the pleasure to host the renowned sociologist and social theorist Professor Nikolas Rose (King’s College London). We organised a number of events around his visit, engaging diverse academic publics in exchange and discussion on topics ranging from the future of psychiatrics biopolitics to urban justice in times of digitisation.

The series of events started off with an inspiring Masterclass in which PhD students from our research group as well as other departments within and beyond the University of Vienna presented and discussed their projects with Nikolas Rose. Professor Rose did not only comment on each individual project, but also provided valuable advice on how to transform empirically grounded work into conceptually rich results.

On 11 December we held a symposium with participants from a broad variety of disciplinary backgrounds to critically discuss what “smart cities” could and should mean in the 21st century. Our aim was to explore this question by going beyond the focus on digital technologies and datafication. Nikolas Rose opened the symposium with a talk on “Mental Health and Urban Justice in the Age of the Smart City”, which was followed by presentations by other participants and lively discussion of conceptualisations of “the smart city” as a socio-technological imaginary, the renegotiation of public space, and the need to foreground social and economic justice in discussing the present and future of cities. 

In the evening of the same day, Professor Rose gave a public lecture on “Our Psychiatric Future: Is Another Psychiatric Biopolitics Possible?”. He stressed the need to move away from the dominant but narrow neuroscientific approach to mental illness towards the incorporation of patients’ social life worlds into psychiatry, as well as a stronger focus on social determinants.

CeSCoS would like to thank Professor Nikolas Rose for visiting us and presenting his recent and ongoing work in such an intellectually stimulating ways. We also thank all participants for their engagement and the interesting discussions in all the events.

Listen here to the public lecture on “Our Psychiatric Future: Is Another Psychiatric Biopolitics Possible?":

Roundtable is a discussion programme with an edge. Broadcast out of London and presented by David Foster, it's about bringing people to the table, listening to every opinion, and analysing every point of view. From fierce debate to reflective thinking, Roundtable discussions offer a different perspective on the issues that matter to you.

On Wednesday 20th November 2019, the topic of the roundtable was "Precision Medicine: Healthcare revolution?". Besides Barbara Prainsack, Joyce Harper (University College London), Catherine Joynson (Nuffield Council on Bioethics) and Patrick Short (Sano Genetics) took part in the discussion.

New Journal Article by Wanda Spahl & August Österle

New Journal Article by Wanda Spahl & August Österle

The new article "Stratified membership: health care access for urban refugees in Turkey", published in the Comparative Migration Studies Journal, examines developements in the light of stratified membership theories. More specifically, it asks how far the healthcare system in Turkey can be categorised as a system of stratified membership for different groups of urban refugees, focusing on refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Abstract:

Turkey hosts more refugees than any other country in the world. Incoming numbers have increased steadily since the outbreak of the Syrian war in 2011. This raises enormous challenges for the host country, not least with regard to the provision of healthcare. This article examines the developments in the light of stratified membership theories. More specifically, it asks how far the healthcare system in Turkey can be categorised as a system of stratified membership for different groups of urban refugees, focusing on refugees from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan. Following a theoretical debate about stratification in the provision of social rights, 16 semi-structured interviews with experts and active participants were carried out in Ankara to understand the situation of urban refugees in need of healthcare. The results confirm assumptions of stratified membership theories which understand citizenship in a broad sense as comprising the interconnected dynamics between social rights, legal status and identity requirements. Next to ethnic categories of origin defining the status in Turkey, factors such as language skills or the individual economic situation also play crucial roles for stratified membership both as an empirical fact and as a constructed practice.

Full Article

 Call for participation: Master Class with Dr Mark Flear

 Call for participation: Master Class with Dr Mark Flear

In November, Dr Mark Flear is going to visit the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity. On November 20, Mark will give an invited lecture in the lecture series of the Department of Political Science.  In addition, we also organize a Master Class for doctoral students and early career researchers. The idea of the class is to enable early career researchers to discuss their work and ideas with Mark and to provide a space that allows them to enter into conversation with one another. Doctoral students and early career researchers from all departments and disciplines are welcome (including law, political science, science and technology studies, and others!)

When: November 21, 2019, 10.00-13.00
Where: University of Vienna, Department of Political Science, Conference Room (Neues Institutsgebäude, Universitätsstraße 7, 2nd floor, Trakt A)

If you are interested in presenting and discussing your work, please send a short message to Ingrid Metzler (ingrid.metzler@univie.ac.at) by October 5, 2019. It would be helpful if you could describe the project, dissertation or paper that you wish to discuss in a couple of sentences. Moreover, we will ask you to send an extended abstract of approximately 1000-1500 words by November 17. These abstracts will be shared among all participants of the Master Class.

Dr Mark Flear is Reader/Associate Professor in Law at Queen’s University Belfast. Dr Flear’s work explores the interactions between European law, science and technology, with a focus on public health and new health technologies. Dr Flear has a special interest in citizen participation in science-based issues and using it to tease out the normative implications of the scientific and technical. Dr Flear contributes widely to all these areas, including through his monograph Governing Public Health (Hart Publishing 2015 pb; 2018 hb). This book provided the first examination of the EU as a biopolitical actor and reframed public health as a matter for citizen participation. Dr Flear is also the lead editor of and a key contributor to the pioneering European Law and New Health Technologies (OUP 2013). Through the latter Dr Flear identified the field and mapped out its broad contours. Dr Flear publishes in other leading collections on European law, and in journals such as the Medical Law Review and the Human Rights Law Review. Dr Flear is currently finalising the manuscript for a special issue of the Journal of Law and the Biosciences, which he is co-editing with Professor Richard Ashcroft. Dr Flear is also working with scholars from across Europe, Asia and Australia on a white paper on applying adaptive governance to health technologies.
Dr Flear has been a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge and the Faculty of Law and Criminology, Vrije Universiteit Brussels. He has provided his expert view to the European Group on Ethics in Science and New Technologies, and has given invited lectures on a number of topics within his research areas, including at the Mason Institute, University of Edinburgh. Mark also has a regulatory role as an independent Member of the Northern Ireland DNA Database Governance Board.

Further information

The Masterclass is organized by the Centre for the Study of Contemporary Solidarity (CeSCos), the Department of Political Science, the Department of Science and Technology Studies, and the Research Focus Knowledge Societies in Turbulent Times.

Lukas Schlögl in Podcast on the Future(s) of Work

Lukas Schlögl in Podcast on the Future(s) of Work

In this podcast @jimmygreer talks to entrepreneurs, policy makers and academics about what has become known as the future of work. We discuss the challenges and opportunities of online platform working; why it is so important and to make this new way of working fair; how some freelancers are making the most of digital; the impact of automation (or should that be ‘automatability’?) on emerging and developing country jobs; and what to do about the so-called ‘rise of the robots’. This podcast is the first in a series exploring the themes from our research into business models of the future. Click here to read a short summary of our latest report on Business Models of the Future https://tinyurl.com/y3an5trg

Guests: Willem Pieter de Groen (Centre for European Policy Studies), Romain Trébuil (Yoss), Ellen Thijs (B-Hive), Natalya Sverensky (NOBL), Brando Benifei (MEP), Luke Schlögl (University of Vienna)

Katharina Kieslich pusblied a new article with the title 'Paradigms in operation: explaining pharmaceutical benefit assessment outcomes in England and Germany' in the Journal of Health Economics

Abstract:

Health technology assessments (HTAs) are used as a policy tool to appraise the clinical value, or cost effectiveness, of new medicines to inform reimbursement decisions in health care. As HTA organisations have been established in different countries, it has become clear that the outcomes of medicine appraisals can vary from country to country, even though the same scientific evidence in the form of randomised controlled trials is available. The extant literature explains such variations with reference to institutional variables and administrative rules. However, little research has been conducted to advance the theoretical understanding of how variations in HTA outcomes might be explained. This paper compares cases of HTA in England and Germany using insights from Kuhn (1962, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 2nd edn. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press) and Hall (1993, Policy paradigms, social learning, and the state: the case of economic policymaking in Britain. Comparative Politics 25, 275–296) to demonstrate how policy paradigms can explain the outcomes of HTA processes. The paper finds that HTA outcomes are influenced by a combination of logical issues that require reasoning within a paradigm, and institutional and political issues that speak to the interaction between ideational and interest-based variables. It sets out an approach that advances the theoretical explanation of divergent HTA outcomes, and offers an analytical basis on which to assess current and future policy changes in HTA.

Kieslich, K. (2019) 'Paradigms in operation: explaining pharmaceutical benefit assessment outcomes in England and Germany'. Journal of Health Economics, Policy and Law. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1744133119000203

The new book is published by Cambridge University Press.
Edited by Laurent Bernhard, University of Zurich, Flavia Fossati, University of Vienna, Regula Hänggli, Université de Fribourg, Switzerland and Hanspeter Kriesi, European University Institute, Florence.

Description:

In 2008 the world experienced the Great Recession, a financial and economic crisis of enormous proportions and the greatest economic downturn since the 1930s. In its wake, unemployment became a key preoccupation of West European publics and politicians. This comparative study considers the policy debates surrounding unemployment in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Denmark and Switzerland since 2008. With an over-arching focus on drawing out cross-national commonalities and differences, the authors ask whether patterns of political communication vary across countries. Their analysis draws on interviews with labour market policy-makers in the six selected countries, and paints a revealing picture. Appealing to researchers in comparative politics, political communication and welfare state research, this book will also interest practitioners involved in labour market policy.

Get your copy here.