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This paper is a case study of the genesis, operation and, in particular, the educational effects of a participatory website established and run by students of one of the largest universities in the Czech Republic, the purpose of which is to enable students to share study materials, essays and evaluations of staff and courses. We study the rise of the website as a bottom-up reaction to deficiencies in the educational process perceived by students, which has led to changes in some of the university's educational practices. Drawing upon ethnographic data, we inquire into the various ways in which the website's existence has influenced educational processes and student-teacher relations. The findings show how such a website's impact can be both positive and negative. While it can foster collaboration and a sense of mutuality among students, trigger institutional reflexivity and generate a platform for the collective production of knowledge lacking in curricula, it can also perpetuate institutional deficiencies by compensating for them, often in undesirable ways such as cheating and plagiarism. A video abstract of this article can be viewed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=49NlvdpEyuE

The Covid-19 pandemic revealed a dramatic need for modes of solidarity and responsibility that take into account welfare of others and simultaneously stem from the recognition of global co-dependency and shared vulnerabilities. Using the concepts of ‘imagined immunity’ and ‘competing responsibilities’, this article examines the ways in which experiences, skills and discourses of the socialist past were mobilized during the first year of the pandemic in the Czech Republic in diverse, often contradictory ways to articulate the complexities of and hindrances to such modes of biopolitical solidarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The changes in and transformations of academic institutions and practices we are currently witnessing are complex. I argue that there are no clear-cut historical transitions between different regimes of science, such as from the "public knowledge regime" to "academic capitalism". Drawing upon John Law's analysis of "modes of ordering", I investigated the multiplicity of academic realities at a leading social science department at a university in the Czech Republic. Using ethnographic data generated during my fieldwork in the department in 2006-2008, I explore how the modes of ordering operate and how they are strategically mobilised by different actors. In contrast to Law, I particularly focus on the interfaces and switches between modes, where, I observe, power is prominently enacted. I conclude by arguing that resistance to the rising managerial governance of universities cannot simply resort to citing the "traditional" academic values of autonomy, vocation and internal quality but must also challenge those values.

The article discusses a qualitative study on the nutritional practices and experiences of people in Czechia following a vegan diet, conducted by researchers including Varvara Borisova and published in the "Journal of Public Health." The study, based on semi-structured interviews with 21 self-reported adult vegans, reveals that ethical, environmental, and health-related motivations drive individuals towards veganism.

This article offers insights into eating practices, conceptualising and making of 'good' food by people living with chronic disease. Based on ethnographic research focussing on people with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (Crohn's disease, ulcerative colitis and undefined IBD) in the Czech Republic, we explore what it would mean to conceptualise disability from the non‐normative gut. We trace the practices of tinkering with foods and one's body, and ways of learning to sense (with) dysbiotic guts that people with IBD develop. Departing from the established notions of digestion and metabolism as universal biological processes, people with IBD create an embodied crip archive of knowledge through their eating practices, ways of making and sensing food and metabolic sampling. Most importantly, these practices offer, as we argue, new pathways into exploring crip embodiments as a place from which to acknowledge and do more‐than‐human collaboration, heath and ecologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the concept of 'local biologies' was proposed in the 1990s, it has been used to examine biosocial processes that transform human bodies in similar and different ways around the globe. This paper explores understandings of biosocial differentiation and convergence in the case of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) in the Czech Republic. Specifically, it examines how Czech TCM practitioners view TCM as universally applicable while fine-tuning it to situated biosocial conditions, experimenting with the compatibilities of various human and plant bodies as part of their generalised, clinical practice. Drawing upon ethnographic research among TCM practitioners in the Czech Republic, it suggests that in addition to the individualization of TCM therapeutics to suit particular patients, Czech TCM is characterised by collective particularization, shaped by local concerns over ethnic, environmental and cultural differences. By looking critically at TCM practitioners' sensitivities to localised biological similarities and differences it aims to contribute to understandings of the expansion of TCM in Central Europe, as well as more broadly to current social science debates over the risks and opportunities inherent in abandoning the assumption of a universal human body and biology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the widespread view that complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is a 'natural' and low-tech form of healthcare, by contrast with biomedicine, there are numerous devices used in the field of CAM that employ electricity as a diagnostic and therapeutic agent. These devices bring together different types and sources of knowledge, Western and Eastern theories, and expert and lay hands. They foreground complex psychosomatic, social, and environmental relations in which the patient's body and well-being are constituted. They are used to address biomedicine's iatrogenic effects and its indifference to specific bodily processes and entities (such as meridians or parasites). In effect they challenge, extend, and reinterpret biomedicine, thereby becoming one of the mediators between it and CAM. Although these devices are sought out by patients and used effectively by CAM practitioners, their ontological choreography and radius can become precarious in a healthcare system dominated by biomedicine. Different CAM devices then deal with the realities of biomedicine in different ways. While some modes of practising CAM devices are inclusive of biomedicine and carefully experiment with the realities it has inscribed in patients' bodies, others reject biomedicine altogether. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over two decades, the checklist has risen to prominence in healthcare improvement. This paper contributes to the debate between its proponents and critics, making the case for an Science and Technology Studies‐informed understanding of the checklist that demonstrates the limitations of both the "checklist‐as‐panacea" and "checklist‐as‐socially‐determined" positions. Attending to the checklist as a socio‐material object endowed with affordances that call upon clinicians to act (Allen 2012, Hutchby 2001), the study revisits the efforts of a recent improvement initiative, the Enhanced Peri‐Operative Care for High‐risk patients trial. Rather than a singularised simple tool, this study discusses four different and relationally enacted logics of the checklist as a stop and check tool, a clinical prompt, an audit tool and a clinical record. Each logic is associated with specific temporality, beneficiaries, relationship with material forms, and interpellates (Law 2002) clinicians to initiate specific actions which can conflict. The paper seeks to make the case for intervention to improve such tools and consciously account for the consequences of their design and materiality and calls for supporting such settings and arrangements in which incoherences collected in tools can be locally negotiated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A. L. Cochrane's Effectiveness and Efficiency frequently appears as a key reference in debates over, and a justification for, contemporary evidence‐based medicine. Cochrane's concern in this text with the equality of care as the ultimate rationale for why effectiveness and efficiency of cure are needed has, however, largely disappeared from debate. In this article, we reconsider Cochrane's approach through the use of case studies of plural forms of medicine in the Czech Republic, namely traditional Chinese medicine, homeopathy and spa care. In addition to bringing equality back into the picture, we also identify four expansions to Cochrane's original vision arising from the difficulties of separating cure from care; the overlap between prevention and cure; the complex actions of some multi‐faceted therapies; and recent reconceptualisations of the placebo effect. In conclusion, we suggest that instead of the widely used strictly vertical "evidence pyramid", a descriptor of the horizontal and additive ordering of evidence might be more appropriate. We also argue that in healthcare systems characterised by a multiplicity of approaches, if we want to truly benefit from this heterogeneity, we must take seriously each medical tradition's approaches to prevention, cure, care, as well as efficiency, efficacy and equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the growing body of literature that critically assesses the ambiguous impacts of institutional review boards (IRBs) on anthropological research, the key standards on which the IRB evaluations are based often remain unquestioned. By exposing the genealogy of an undercover research in which the authors participated as ethnographer, supervisor, and research participant, this article problematizes some of these standards and addresses the issues of power dynamics in research, informed consent, and anonymization in published work. It argues that rather than addressing genuine ethical dilemmas, IRB standards and the ethical fiction of informed consent mainly protect researchers from having to openly face the uncertainties of fieldwork. As an alternative, the authors put forth the notion of c/overt research, which perceives any research as processual and, in effect, becoming overt only during the research process itself. As such, it forces researchers to cultivate sensitivity to research ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on fieldwork in the postsocialist Czech Republic, we explore the transformative processes of biomedicalization, both within and in relation to complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). We argue that it would be simplistic to understand evidence of these processes in CAM as a sign that CAM has fallen prey to biomedicine. Instead, we show how particular CAM practices play a groundbreaking role in shaping developments in contemporary health care. In this respect, we question the utility of the concept of biomedicalization, arguing that it reduces the transformative processes to aspects of biomedicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contributing to the ongoing debate on decentering science, technology, and society (STS) from Western contexts, this article elaborates on and reconsiders Wen-yuan Lin and John Law's proposal for correlative STS ("A Correlative STS" 2014). Like them, we empirically draw on Chinese medicine (CM) and its relation to biomedicine, but we explore the modes by which CM was enacted in the historical, political, and sociomaterial settings of socialist and postsocialist Central Europe. We show that not only specific correlations but also correlativity itself--as the ontological stance of the actors--are situated and can shift. Our argument regarding STS is twofold. First, while Lin and Law argue that STS needs to develop an appropriate mode of betrayal when translating across ontological differences from a source language to a destination language (Western analytics), we show that in our case an ethnographer cannot find any single source language. Consequently, we argue that STS should study actors' modes and moves of betrayal and their doing ontology as an open process. Second, unlike Lin and Law, who postulate the Chinese mode of international as "subtle" and "minimalist" and an alternative to theWestern mode (Lin and Law 2013), we argue that with the rise of China and the changing world political economy, STS needs to be more attentive to dominating expansions that come from non-Western locations as much as from the West. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, research has undergone major changes, resulting in radical shifts in patterns of governance. In this process, external forms of research assessment have developed as a proxy for researchers' and research institutions' accountability to society. In this paper we focus on the developments of research assessment in the Czech Republic. First, we trace the trajectory of accountability measures in the socio-historical contexts of post-socialist science as a tool of not only evaluating but also de-politicizing and re-politicizing research. Second, we focus on the active participation of scientists in the introduction of research assessment into national research policy. Closely related is our third concern, namely the emergence of and clashes between two different accountability frameworks in/of science: (internal) professional accountability and (external) managerial accountability. Our findings underscore the ambiguous, messy and fluid nature of research assessment and the inability to totalize its effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology has become a key vehicle and index of the societal impact of science. Technology’s dominant image, both in science and technology studies (STS) and in science policies, is one of a material device or a complex procedure using machines with origins in natural science disciplines. This article inquires into the vehicles and forms of societal impact in the case of the social sciences. It empirically looks into the generation and circulation of knowledge and expertise on Roma and, drawing upon Strathern, follows three types of vehicles: projects, products, and persons. In the conclusion it argues against the asymmetrical treatment of the social and natural sciences or social and material technologies, and suggests that the troubles the social sciences have with accounting for their societal impact are comparable to effects of critical evaluation of the natural sciences and should be seriously considered as exposing more general challenges for science in a knowledge society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]