This photo-essay highlights the ways in which medicine features in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (OPT) and uses it to reflect on the nature of ethical obligation set out by Judith Butler in her work on state-achieved precarity. Although medical infrastructure of even the most basic type is tragically lacking and in some areas shockingly absent in the OPT, it is the particular way in which medicine comes to be needed that we focus on. Leaving aside the rhetoric that has claimed (...) authority over what can or cannot be said of the Occupation, we focus on its geo-technological arrangements. By placing photos and case studies of medical obstruction within an analysis of the Occupation, we forge an encounter between reader and the Occupation to raise questions about the use of medicine in this context and the manner in which conventional ethics can give legitimacy to this use. On the basis of what we show through visual and textual documentary material, we propose ethics be understood as inherent to the geo-technological arrangements that make life possible or, as in this case, undermine, obstruct or deliberately take life. Hence the ethical obligation that Butler calls upon is reiterated in ways that encompass the everyday features of occupation including those active in the emergence of medicine as a tactic of war. (shrink)

This study draws on interviews with forty-nine members of a biomedical research community in the UK that is involved in negotiating data sharing and access. During an interview, an interviewee used the words “ethical moment” to describe a confrontation between collaborators in relation to data sharing. In this article, I use this as a lens for thinking about relations between “the conceptual and the empirical” in a way that allows both analyst and actor to challenge the status quo and consider (...) other ethical possibilities. Drawing on actor network theory, I approach “the empirical” using the concepts of controversy and ontological uncertainty as methodological tools to tackle the problem of ethics. I suggest that these concepts also provide a bridge for understanding the ontological structure of the virtual and the actual, as described in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition. While other science and technology studies scholars have sought to draw on Deleuze, this article addresses the integration of ethics and empirical research. It arises as a critical reaction to existing treatments of this problem as found in empirical ethics, especially in the sociology of bioethics, and indirectly in ANT texts. (shrink)