Thesis title:
Precision Vaccines and Educated Immune Systems: The shaping of immune systems through immunological practices
About the project:
This thesis is about precision vaccinology, focusing on how precision is constructed through scientific practices and how precision shapes science-society relations. Following the sequencing of the human genome in the early 2000s, precision medicine has become a key medical and political vision. This approach seeks to tailor-make healthcare based on a person’s genes, lifestyle, and environment. In the last ten-fifteen years there has been a similar turn in immunology with proponents of precision vaccines advocating the need to acknowledge and incorporate individual differences into the development of vaccines. Precision vaccines should therefore provide safer and more effective protection for the individual and society. This thesis has followed a group of immunologists in Norway who develop targeted DNA vaccines. It is an in-depth study of how relations between science and society are created through their work to establish precision. Studying the societal role rather than the immunological role of vaccines from the vantage point of the immunologists provides new perspectives on science-society interfaces and entanglements in relation to vaccines.
Thesis supervisors:
Associate Professor Tone Druglitrø, TIK - Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Professor Gail Davies, Department of Geography, University of Exeter
Commentator:
Associate Professor Carrie Friese, Department of Sociology, London School of Economics and Political Science
About Hanne Castberg Thee Tresselt:
Hanne Castberg Thee Tresselt is a Doctoral Research Fellow at TIK. This seminar marks the final evaluation prior to submission of her dissertation.
In her project she ethnographically explores innovations in vaccine development, especially DNA-vaccines, and how the human immune system is created, conceptualized and made resistant in the laboratory through practices, materialities, metaphors, and rhetorical actions. She focuses especially on the human/more-than-human entanglements and science-society relations through communication practices. The project is part of ResBod: Resisting Bodies: the Politics and Practices of the Immune System.
She holds a Bachelor's degree in Social Anthropology and an inter-disciplinary Master's degree in Development and the Environment, both from the University of Oslo. For her masters she did fieldwork in an animal house, investigating how animal technicians deal with ethical dilemmas when working with and using animals in the laboratory for medical research. Through this work she was introduced to STS and laboratory ethnography. She has also completed Practical Teacher Training (PPU) and spent three years working as a teacher.
She is currently a Visiting Student Researcher at UC Berkeley.
How to participate
The seminar is open to everyone. Please register by sending an email to Ingrid Helene Johnsen i.h.johnsen@tik.uio.no by 24 June 2024.
Meeting ID: 686 7782 2465
Passcode: 729698
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Hanne Castberg Thee Tresselt h.c.t.tresselt@tik.uio.no.
Welcome!