Sergio Sismondo is a Professor of Philosophy at Queen’s University, Canada, and is editor of the journal Social Studies of Science.
About
I am a Professor of Philosophy, cross-appointed to Sociology, at Queen’s University, Canada. In one side of my work, I am a generalist in Science and Technology Studies, a field that looks at science, technology and medicine as social and material activities. In my empirical research, I shine lights on some important tactics and practices that drug companies use to influence medicine, and have developed a framework for understanding political economies of pharmaceutical knowledge.
Projects
Science and Technology Studies
Scientific knowledge is produced. That is a good starting point for Science and Technology Studies. From there, we can ask how it’s produced and legitimated, by and for whom, under what circumstances, for what purposes, etc. We can ask similar questions about technological knowledge and practices, and extend our view to connected terrains.
I have written one of the main textbooks of the field, An Introduction to Science and Technology Studies (2nd ed, 2010), as well as a number of other general or theoretical studies. I am the editor of Social Studies of Science, one of STS’s flagship journals.
Pharmaceutical Knowledge
Pharmaceutical companies sustain large networks to gather, create, control and disseminate information. Because of the companies’ resources, their interests and their levels of control, they often become key shapers of medical terrains.
I describe paths of drug information and knowledge from contract research organizations (which perform the bulk of pharma’s research) to publication planners (who direct the production of ghostwritten medical journal articles) to key opinion leaders (who are deployed to educate physicians about drugs) and beyond. In describing these paths I am describing circumstances of the production, circulation and consumption of medical knowledge; as a result, my project is about political economies of knowledge.
For an overview of the project, you can watch this recorded lecture. For a longer introduction, you can download my recent open-access book, Ghost-Managed Medicine: Big Pharma’s Invisible Hands.
“Corruption” is an old term and a widely used metaphor. Bodies, fruits and meats are corrupted when they begin to rot, decompose, or otherwise spoil. More generally, what is thought pure is corrupted when mixed with something foul or lesser, as when air is made foul by pestilence or smoke, or noble lineages are supposedly lessened by poor marriages. Ends are perverted, as when a public official is corrupted for a purpose, to serve some interests rather than others. Or perhaps purities may simply become less so, degenerating from within.
With Daryn Lehoux and Norma Möllers, I am working on a project on epistemic corruption, the corruption of knowledge practices and their legitimacy. Especially in the context of real and perceived crises of epistemic authority, there is value in analyzing knowledge systems in terms of all the above and other senses of the metaphor.
Teaching
I tend to teach a combination of general courses in philosophy at the introductory level and courses in Science and Technology Studies at the senior undergraduate and graduate levels.
Like many people, in 2020-21 I’m trying to learn how to teach well online. I’m focused on a large (450 students) writing-intensive introduction to philosophy course. Because of its size, I’m doing almost all of the teaching asynchronously – via recorded lectures and the like. As the year has gone on, I’ve realized that one of the important things I can do is to try to give my students a sense that they are part of a class with other students, reducing all of our isolation by just a little.
Teaching Assistant Phoebe