Arbeitsbereich für Wissensgeschichte und politische Epistemologien von Biowissenschaften und Medizin im 20. Jahrhundert

Birgit Nemec hat die Position der Assistenzprofessorin für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Medizin und Biowissenschaften am Fakultätszentrum für transdisziplinäre historische-kulturelle Studien der Universität Wien im Dezember 2024 übernommen. Nach längeren Forschungsaufenthalten am Max-Planck-Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte in Berlin, der Universität Cambridge und der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin war sie als wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin an der Universität Heidelberg und als Stipendiatin im Brigitte-Schlieben-Lange-Programm tätig, bevor sie 2021 als Professorin für Geschichte der Medizin an die Charité Berlin wechselte. Ihre Forschungsinteressen umfassen die Geschichte der Reproduktion, Sex/Gender-Diversität, Patientenaktivismus, Behinderung und die Politik des Wissens sowie Oral-History-Methoden und Methoden der Forschungszusammenarbeit. Ihr Buch Norm und Reform (Wallstein 2020) untersucht die Rolle anatomischer Körperbilder im Kampf um Hegemonie, körperliche Normen und soziale Reformen um 1925. An der Universität Wien wird sie an dem von der Europäischen Forschungsrats (ERC) geförderten Projekt Beyond Thalidomide. The Patient as an Agent of Change arbeiten, das Arzneimittel bedingte Behinderungen und reproduktive Gesundheit aus einer globalen Perspektive untersucht.

ERC Project Beyond Thalidomide: The Patient as an Agent of Change (2024-2029)

Beyond Thalidomide (BT), funded by an ERC Starting Grant brings the patient perspective into the history of drug related risks and reproductive and global health. It traces the global rise of patient engagement with drug-related disability in the second half of the twentieth century to understand how newly empowered agents transformed conceptions of (reproductive) health and disease in science and society. The project maps the conditions of patient engagement with antenatal drug use and reconstructs how patient action created political and scientific urgency starting in 1960. Their multifaceted activities resulted in clashes between different forms of knowledge and expertise that connected actors in the “global South” and “North”—from Latin America through Central Africa, India, and Europe—in the enforcement, implementation, and stabilization of reproductive health approaches that addressed the emerging challenges to democracy and civil society, beyond traditional accounts of expert-led iatrogenic risk management.

The project’s objectives are: 

- To examine transformations in (reproductive) health by interrogating how patients act, organize, activate, and appropriate resources on “markets”, produce knowledge and expertise, and engage and communicate—distinct from authoritative scientific and political-regulatory counterparts (Obj1).
- To develop a Framework of Patients as Agents of Change though the lens of drug-related disability, including the imprint on local, national, and global reproductive health, from the 1960s to the digital age (Obj2).
- To lay the groundwork for a more active and inclusive as opposed to proactive and paternalistic approach to global health policy making, recognizing the challenges of iatrogenic risks and disability and the potential of participatory approaches for democratic governance and civil society (Obj3) 

BT addresses these objectives through the analysis of four interlinked fields of patient engagement:

1. Monitoring and the surveillance of exogenous factors for birth defects
2. Prevention and the management of risks of antenatal drug use in health care systems
3. Global Markets and the development and production of pharmaceutical products
4. Legal action and court intervention

In mapping out these fields of activity, BT will create an ambitious digital collection of patient life stories and a comprehensive integrated framework of how patients engage. BT will deliver, for the first time, a global history of drug-related disability “from below” that examines the shifting contours of patients as agents of change. It takes a groundbreaking approach to the historiography of reproductive health, combining high-impact global case studies with innovative research tools to explore the political, ethical, and social challenges of this alternative perspective and its implications for policy reform.