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Imagine that you volunteer for the clinical trial of an experimental drug. The only direct benefit of participating is that you will receive up to $5,175. You must spend twenty nights literally locked in a research facility. You will be told what to eat, when to eat, and when to sleep. You will share a bedroom with several strangers. Who are you, and why would you choose to take part in this kind of study? This book explores the hidden world of pharmaceutical testing on healthy volunteers. Drawing on two years of fieldwork in clinics across the country and 268 interviews with participants and staff, it illustrates how decisions to take part in such studies are often influenced by poverty and lack of employment opportunities. It shows that healthy participants are typically recruited from African American and Latino/a communities, and that they are often serial participants, who obtain a significant portion of their income from these trials.

Phase I clinical trials are the first stage of testing new pharmaceuticals in humans. The majority of these studies are conducted under controlled, inpatient conditions using healthy volunteers who are paid for their participation. This article draws on an ethnographic study of six phase I clinics in the United States, including 268 semistructured interviews with research staff and healthy volunteers. In it, I argue that an institutional banalization of risk structures the perceptions of research staff and healthy volunteers participating in the studies. For research staff, there are three mechanisms by which risk becomes banal: a perceived homogeneity of studies, Fordist work regimes, and data-centric discourse. For healthy volunteers, repeat study participation contributes to the institutional banalization of risk both through the process of desensitization to risk and the formation of trust in the clinics. I argue that the institutional banalization of risk also renders invisible ethical concerns about exploitation of underprivileged groups in pharmaceutical research.

In this paper I explore the politics of trust in the clinical testing of pharmaceuticals in the US. Specifically, I analyze trust in terms of its institutional manifestations in the pharmaceutical clinical trials industry. In the process of testing new drugs, pharmaceutical companies must (1) protect their proprietary information from the clinicians who conduct their studies, and (2) find a way to ensure human subjects' compliance to study protocols. Concern with these two critical issues leads drug companies to approach clinicians and research subjects with an attitude of mistrust and the desire to exert control over their activities. This orientation results in an institutionalization of mistrust that structures the relationships and activities required for the clinical development of new pharmaceutical products.

This paper aims to expand standard conceptions of current ethical issues by discussing pharmaceutical clinical trials in terms of the broader political economy. Specifically, it explores one important characteristic of the political economy in the United States: the trend towards the neoliberalization of health care. First, it provides an overview of neoliberalism and its manifestations in the health care sector. Then, it applies this perspective to pharmaceutical drug development. The paper argues that federal regulation must attend to the context of clinical research to protect human subjects more fully.

This article examines the complex relationship between power and the physical and social practices of tattooing in contemporary United States. Briefly tracing the history of tattooing from ancient Greece to contemporary America, I highlight the temporal and geographical changes in the practices and perceptions of tattooing. In addition to creating a historical narrative, I situate the sociocultural practice of tattooing the body for the tattooist and the `tattooee'. This investigation into body inscription serves as a means to elucidate the contemporary practice of tattooing as one that is simultaneously physical and social, with multiple levels of constructed meaning. Finally, I will explore how tattooing, as a form of body modification, can be analyzed as a form of resistance to or a symptom of a culture that has commodified the body.

Purpose: Meeting the needs of dual-career academic couples can be an important step in recruiting and retaining university faculty and researchers. The goal of this essay is to review the existing scholarship on dual-career hires and offer concrete recommendations for university administrators.


Background/Motivation: Attending to dual-career needs is especially relevant to efforts at diversifying the academic workforce, as multiple studies have indicated that faculty appointments are a major contributor to the so-called leaky pipeline causing attrition of women and scholars of color, particularly in biomedical and STEM fields. We take it as a feminist imperative to confront institutional discrimination against dual-career scholars and to intervene in the service of collective praxis.


Intended Audience: Scholars and administrators interested in understanding and overcoming institutional barriers to achieving diverse, inclusive, and family-friendly academic workplaces.


Contribution: This essay synthesizes the recent literature on dual-career hires and offers recommendations for university administrators.


Positionality: We approach this issue as a senior academic couple that has navigated dual-career job searches for close to twenty years and has held faculty positions together at three different academic institutions. We are a white, hetero dual-career academic couple interested in developing resources for individuals striving to activate change at their universities.

This article develops the concept of temporal total institutions to describe how and why individuals voluntarily submit to highly controlled and often dehumanizing environments. We focus empirically on Phase I clinical trials, which offer compensation to healthy people in exchange for testing investigational pharmaceuticals. Analyzing the experiences of 67 U.S. healthy volunteers, we illustrate how comparisons between Phase I trials and prison are salient to participants as they reflect on their confinement in research facilities and their interactions with other participants and research staff. We argue that conditions of contemporary economic insecurity and/or poverty facilitate the existence of coercive temporal total institutions by undermining voluntariness. Phase I clinics take advantage of the steady supply of individuals who will submit to the organization's demands out of hope that the income gained will be transformative for their lives.

This article responds to the criticism that 'observer effects' in ethnographic research necessarily bias and possibly invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants' performances — however staged for or influenced by the observer — often reveal profound truths about social and/or cultural phenomena. To make this case, first we mobilize methodological insights from the field of science studies to illustrate the contingency and partiality of all knowledge and to challenge the notion that ethnography is less objective than other research methods. Second, we draw upon our ethnographic projects to illustrate the rich data that can be obtained from 'staged performances' by informants. Finally, by detailing a few examples of questionable behavior on the part of informants, we challenge the fallacy that the presence of ethnographers will cause informants to self-censor.