This article poses the question of whether biobanking practices and standards are giving rise to the construction of populations from which various biobanking initiatives increasingly draw on for legitimacy? We argue that although recent biobanking policies encourage various forms of engagement with publics to ensure legitimacy, different biobanks conceptualize their engagement strategies very differently. We suggest that biobanks undertake a broad range of different strategies with regard to engagement. We argue that these different approaches to engagement strategies are contributing to the construction of populations, whereby specific nationalities, communities, societies, patient groups and political systems become imbued or bio-objectified with particular characteristics, such as compliant, distant, positive, commercialized or authoritarian. This bio-objectification process is problematic in relation to policy aspirations ascribed to biobanking engagement since it gives rise to reified notions of different populations.

Global policy for managing antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is underpinned by a standardised and coherent global framework for reducing antibiotic use in clinical health, veterinary health, and food production sectors. Within the framework, problematic antibiotic use (a significant driver of AMR) is treated as a knowledge deficit on the part of users and prescribers, which can be remedied by educating them to make better informed treatment decisions. This narrow approach to AMR management conceals the socioeconomic and material drivers of antibiotic decision-making, creating challenges for low resource regions that rely on antibiotic therapies to manage uncertainty and precarity. Thus, there is a need for a global AMR policy that acknowledges the diversity of sociomaterial arrangements and practices that antibiotics form part of, if their use is to be reduced without undermining productivity or the attainment of poverty reduction indicators. Drawing upon research of antibiotic use in West Africa’s livestock sector, this article analyses the interrelation of antibiotics, AMR action plans, and production management strategies in ecologies of livestock breeding practices. We apply the STS-influenced perspective of noncoherence to analyse how seemingly contradictory practices and institutional logics productively coalesce. We argue that observing noncoherent practices increases our understanding of antibiotic use in relation to local breeding conditions that are frequently not of the producers’ making, whilst drawing attention to context-specific possibilities for improving livestock management capacities and reducing reliance on antibiotic therapies in low-resource settings. The article concludes by calling for an AMR global policy that is more responsive to local specificity rather than enforcing universal standardisation.

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Pandemic emergencies are one of the foremost examples of the turn to preparedness. In this article, I discuss how biological threats are conceptualized inside the frame provided by such turn, connecting with novel governance practices aimed at tackling the challenges posed by the constantly shifting boundaries of global health. First, I review existing literature related to the turn to preparedness. This turn has turned virtual biological threats into the main drivers for preparedness planning. Second, I use empirical material to argue a redefinition of biological threats as entities that go beyond the molecular boundaries of viruses, turning hybrid social networks into the main object of interest for global health response before infectious diseases. This reconceptualization is manifested in three different challenges to the boundaries of global health emergencies: (1) a temporal challenge, which forces institutions to struggle with situating the boundary between event and non-event; (2) an institutional challenge, which brings together different actors, institutions and organizations redefining their internal and external boundaries; and (3) a spatial challenge, whereby the territorial lines of secure and unsecure spaces become mobile and unstable. As a conclusion, I will argue that those three challenges and the redefinition of certain boundaries are ways to govern a wider divide constructed by preparedness that aims at separating the threat and an object of protection.

Some authors have noted that in biobank research participants may be guided by what is called therapeutic misconception, whereby participants attribute therapeutic intent to research procedures. This article argues that the notion of therapeutic misconception is increasingly less justifi ed when evaluating biobanks. We present four examples taken from recent developments in biobanking to argue why the notion of therapeutic misconception is problematic in that biobanking practices are increasingly seeking to bridge research and treatment in diff erent ways. In this article we explore examples where the boundary between research and treatment become increasingly blurred, as well as the contextual signifi cance of healthcare systems and their prevailing ideologies in healthcare management. We argue that biobanking practices are challenging the use value, as well as the philosophical and ethical underpinnings for the need to separate research and treatment, and thus the notion of therapeutic misconception in the fi rst place. We call this tension between research and treatment ambivalent research advancement to highlight the diffi culties that various actors have in managing such shifts within the healthcare-research systems.