In this paper, I take seriously informed consent's material form: the paper form. I pursue two objectives: I first tackle different meanings that have been attributed to the fabrication of document forms themselves, and demonstrate how this fabrication process forces us to rethink the category of consent and, further, that of personhood. Second, I examine the consenting person as a new ethnographic subject and show how her submission to consent forms, in the context of hospital bureaucracies, enacts new forms of agency. Given the fact that patients and research subjects generally do not read consent documents, I conclude by offering the illegible consent form, rather than the meticulously designed consent form, as the exemplary artifact of hospital bureaucracies.

Based on fieldwork in the Committee on Publication Ethics, this paper offers an analysis of the forms of doings that publication ethics in action can take during what is called the ‘Forum’, a space where allegations of dubious research conduct get aired and debated between editors and publishers. This article examines recurring motifs within the review of publication practices whose ethics are called into. These motifs include: the shaping of publication ethics as an expertise that can be standardized across locations and disciplines, the separation of the research record from relations that produce it, and the divisibility of the scientific paper. Together these institute an ethics of repair at the centre of the curative enterprise of the Committee on Publication Ethics. Under the language of correcting the literature the members are working out, along with authors, what the research record should be and, inevitably, what it is. In turn, this article elicits new analytical objects that re-describe publication ethics as a form of expertise, beyond (and despite) the rehearsed axioms of this now well-established professional field.

In this paper I problematise quite a simple assertion: that the two major frameworks used in assessing consent to post-mortem organ donation, presumed consent and informed consent, are procedurally similar in that both are 'default rules.' Because of their procedural common characteristic, both rules do exclude marginalized groups from consent schemes. Yet this connection is often overlooked. Contract theory on default rules, better than bioethical arguments, can assist in choosing between these two rules. Applying contract theory to the question of post-mortem organ donation suggests that the default rule should be one that goes against the wishes of the stronger party in consent decisions.

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This paper attends to writing practices by way of examining how a professional regulator engages with research activities conducted by doctors. In order to explore regulatory responses to alleged research misconduct, I use a specific calligraphic practice shared by researchers and regulators. The paper shows that taking this calligraphic practice as an analytical focus can offer surprising dividends to the study of regulation across fields. Via the practice of strikethrough, the General Medical Council effectuates three gestures as it engages with research activities: display, authentication and isolation. Understanding them requires asking what literal and metaphorical meanings travel in the strikethrough.