LSE's Global Health Initiative is pleased to host a seminar with Professor Anna Holzscheiter, to discuss her recent co-authored paper in Social Science & Medicine, "Biobanking as a Contentious Issue in Global Health Governance: Diversification and contestation of policy frames in international biobanking debates."
Biobanks are an integral part of contemporary biomedical and biotechnological research, nationally and internationally. Over time, biobanking has also become invariably more transnationalised, following broader developments of biomedical research across borders. The manifold technical, legal, ethical and governance challenges resulting from such transboundary, potentially global, circulation of human specimens and related data, have to date not resulted in any binding, truly international agreement regulating transnational issues with biobanking.
In this seminar, I will present our recent paper’s analysis on when and in what way biobanking has been subject to policy debates in international organizations, with a particular interest in the most prominent policy frames that have informed these debates. We identify biobanking as an underexplored area of research on international policy-making, notwithstanding its prominence in global health cooperation and the many contentious issues that surround it.
We find that biobanking has evolved from a technical, apolitical matter into a multi-faceted issue, which is reflected in the diversification of frames circulating in international organizations. We identify a number of policy frames that have emerged as particularly contested over time, with human rights frames standing out as having the most divisive potential.
Meet Our Speaker
Anna Holzscheiter is Professor of International Politics at TUD Dresden University of Technology and currently a Visiting Professor at the Department of International Relations at LSE. After obtaining her PhD from Freie Universität Berlin in 2006, she was first Research Associate then Assistant Professor at the Center for Transnational Relations at FU Berlin until 2019. Previously, she was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Public Health Policy at the LSHTM (2007-2010) and John F. Kennedy Memorial Fellow at Harvard University (2014-2015). From April 2015 until December 2021, she was Head of the Research Group "Governance for Global Health" at WZB Social Science Research Center Berlin. She has published widely on the turbulent biographies and contestation of international norms; on regime complexity in global (health) governance; on nonstate actors in international institutions; and on global health and human rights issues.
Our chair, Justin Parkhurst (@justinparkhurst) is an Associate Professor of Global Health Policy and Deputy Head of Department (Teaching) in the LSE Department of Health Policy. He served for many years as co-director of the MSc in Health Policy, Planning, and Financing programme, and was the inaugural Chair of the LSE Global Health Initiative. Dr Parkhurst’s research interests lie in global health politics and policy, as well as the political nature of evidence use to inform policy decisions.
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