Anticipatory Governance in Biobanking: Security and Risk Management in Digital Health.

Although big-data research has met with multiple controversies in diverse fields, political and security implications of big data in life sciences have received less attention. This paper explores how threats and risks are anticipated and acted on in biobanking, which builds research repositories for biomedical samples and data. Focusing on the biggest harmonisation cluster of biomedical research in Europe, BBMRI-ERIC, the paper analyses different logics of risk in the anticipatory discourse on biobanking. Based on document analysis, interviews with ELSI experts, and field research, three types of framing of risk are reconstructed: data security, privacy, and data misuse. The paper finds that these logics downplay the broader social and political context and reflects on the limits of the practices of anticipatory governance in biobanking. It argues that this regime of governance can make it difficult for biobanks to address possible future challenges, such as access to biomedical data by authorities, pressures for integrating biobank data with other type of personal data, or their use for profiling beyond medical purposes. To address potential controversies and societal implications related to the use of big data in health research and medicine, the paper suggests to expand the vocabulary and practices of anticipatory governance, in the biobanking community and beyond.

Science, technology, security: Towards critical collaboration.

Science and technology play a central role in the contemporary governance of security, both as tools for the production of security and as objects of security concern. Scholars are increasingly seeking to not only critically reflect on the interplays between science, technology and security, but also engage with the practices of security communities that shape and are shaped by science and technology. To further help this growth of interest in security topics within science and technology studies (STS), we explore possible modes of socio-technical collaboration with security communities of practice. Bringing together literatures from STS and critical security studies, we identify several key challenges to critical social engagement of STS scholars in security-related issues. We then demonstrate how these challenges played out over the course of three case studies from our own experience in engaging security communities of practice. We use these vignettes to show that there is a rich vein of developments in both theory and practice that STS scholars can pursue by attending to the interplay of science, technology and security.