Violeta Argudo-Portal

• PhD
• Lecturer Serra Húnter at University of Barcelona

ABSTRACT This research asks what is being put to the test by breast and gynecological cancer predisposition testing in Spain beyond genes or cancer. By combining document analysis and fieldwork with national healthcare professionals and drawing on the anthropology and sociology of testing, I examine how the molecular relations of these tests extend...

Cryobanks for biomedical research are high-security sites. After all, hundreds of thousands or millions of human-based biospecimens, associated data, and multiple biomedical and scientific promises are the inhabitants of such sites. Qualitative research on biobanks mainly focuses on donors’ perspectives, and long-term ethnographic accounts in bioba...

We demonstrate a transnationally situated dialogue as a method to bring ethnographic and historical research in Brazil, East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda), India, Russia and Spain into conversation to show three cancer epistemics sites (research, detection, and care access) where the politics of cancer epistemics are at play. First, in the fi...

This article explores how cell immunotherapy becomes deliverable at the in-betweens of the bench, bedside, and community in translational medicine. During ethnographic research in an advanced cell therapies unit, I observed how the staff made virus-specific T cells available for therapeutic use. In dialogue with recent Science and Technology Studie...

Freezers with biospecimen deposits became biobanks and later were networked at the pan-European level in 2013 under the Biobanking and BioMolecular Resources Research Infrastructure—European Research Infrastructure Consortium (BBMRI-ERIC). Drawing on document analysis about the BBMRI-ERIC and multi-sited fieldwork with biobankers in Spain from a sc...

The oscillation between the promise and the disappointment of biobanks as techno-scientific infrastructures for contemporary biomedical research is frequent in the literature. In this article, we analysed how the precariousness of biobanks is leading to shifts in the focus of biobanking in Spain, where there are calls for some practices to be reart...

In this paper we explore how the definition of life takes on an essential character in the ethical debates around health technologies, with life thus being manufactured in the tensions and conflicts around the use of such artifacts and devices. We introduce concepts from science and technology studies (STS) to approach bioethics, overcoming the dua...

In this paper, we explore how the definition of life takes on an essential character in the ethical debates around health technologies, with life thus being manufactured in the tensions and conflicts around the use of such artefacts and devices. We introduce concepts from science and technology studies (STS) to approach bioethics, overcoming the du...

Book Review (Spanish): Radin, Joana; Kowal, Emma (Eds.) (2017). Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World. Cambridge: The MIT Press.

En su afán por estudiar las relaciones sociales la antropología se ha encontrado desde sus comienzos como disciplina con personas y objetos en movimiento. Por lo tanto, las obras presentadas como clásicas abordan de un modo u otro las actualmente denominadas “movilidades”. Este artículo presenta un ejercicio reflexivo que invita a la incomodidad y...

[Prototyping bio-objects: parafilm, coffee filters and other (enrolled)materials for self-diagnosis]. Intermediate Conference of the CIT18: Technology, humans and vice-versa. Organized by the Spanish Federation of Sociology, Research Committee on the Sociology of Knowledge, Science, Technology and Innovation.