ABSTRACT
Recent research indicates that asthma is more complicated than already recognized, requiring a multilateral approach of study in order to better understand its many facets. Apart from being a health problem, asthma is seen as a knowledge problem, and as we argue here, a cultural problem. Employing cultural analysis we outline ways to challenge conventional ideas and practices about asthma by considering how culture shapes asthma experience, diagnosis, management, research, and politics. Finally, we discuss the value of viewing asthma through multiple lenses, and how such "explanatory pluralism" advances transdisciplinary approaches to asthma.
Subject(s)
Asthma/ethnology , Asthma/psychology , Asthma/physiopathology , Cross-Cultural Comparison , Cultural Characteristics , Ethnicity , Humans , Inflammation/ethnology , Inflammation/physiopathology , Inflammation/psychology , Politics , Prejudice/ethnology , Prejudice/psychology , Severity of Illness IndexABSTRACT
This essay questions some of the limits that both science studies and bioethics have assumed in their engagements with technoscience, and genomics in particular. It argues that these disciplines have privileged an "ethics of suspicion" regarding technoscience, and argues that this is ill-suited to promissory sciences such as genomics. The essay begins to develop elements of an "ethics of friendship" toward genomics, using examples from toxicogenomics and behavioral genetics, to suggest what an ethics of promising might involve.
