Our project “Contextualizing biobanking in Greece: histories, practices, discourses” (BIO-CONTEXT) is being funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) under the “2nd Call for H.F.R.I. Research Projects to support Post-Doctoral Researchers” (Project Number: 00089). Our Host Institution is the Department of History and Philosophy of Science, at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. The implementation of the project began in April 2021 and will be running for 30 months. I am Katerina Vlantoni, postdoctoral researcher and Principal Investigator (PI) in BIO-CONTEXT, in which I will be working together with the postdoctoral researchers Yulie Foka-Kavalieraki and Giorgos Zoukas.
In BIO-CONTEXT, we aim at studying the emergence and development of biobanks in Greece, paying equal attention to the ways they are being communicated. In the first period of the project, we undertook administrative duties to ensure the smooth implementation of the project and developed tools for the dissemination of the project, most notably, the BIO-CONTEXT website.
Our work plan consists of seven work packages. Two of them include horizontal activities (WP1: Management and coordination & WP7: Dissemination and Exploitation of the Research). Currently, we undertake research (WP2) in order to perform the secondary literature review. We search, collect and study a large corpus of published studies regarding the development and operation of biobanks. We focus on studies from the History of Biomedical Science and Technology and the field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). To broaden our study, we also rely on studies from allied fields and disciplines, covering the social, epistemological, ethical and legal issues around the biobanking sector. To inform our theoretical approach, we are going to critically examine and analyze secondary literature with an emphasis on national case studies on biobanking. In BIO-CONTEXT, our objective is to produce an appropriate context for understanding biobanks, focusing on their histories, practices and discourses. Our methodology is based on the grounds of exploring a broad definition of what a ‘biobank’ is to include diverse practices and to trace its stabilization, as the contents of biobanks (as “bio-objects”) are being processed and circulated.
We welcome you and will keep you informed about the BIO-CONTEXT activities!