Studies in sociology and political science at the University of Vienna and the Université Catholique de Louvain. 2009-2015 university assistant, researcher and lecturer at the Department of Science and Technology Studies of the University of Vienna. Research stays at the Science and Technology Studies Program, UC Davis and the Centre de Sociologie de l'Innovation, Mines ParisTech. From May 2016 to September 2021 postdoc and senior lecturer (akademischer Rat) at the MCTS, Technical University of Munich. Since October 2021 senior lecturer and researcher at the University of Applied Sciences Wiener Neustadt. Address: Schlögelgasse 22-26
Past, Present and Future Directions of Biosocial Collaboration, Jun 30, 2024
In the last decade, scholars in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have incr... more In the last decade, scholars in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have increasingly engaged in translating the field’s insights into policy and society. Several multidisciplinary advocacy groups have been formed to promote women’s reproductive health as well as maternal and child health. They have framed DOHaD in different ways in order to attract policy attention. Framing is the practice of contextualising and interpreting the meaning of research results in various communication activities. Overall, DOHaD has often been shown to exhibit a narrow focus on individual responsibility and translation at the clinician–patient interface instead of focusing on wider socio-economic, cultural, and political factors influencing health in its framing activities. In this chapter, we examine two case studies of multidisciplinary networks (the Venice Forum and UK Preconception Partnership) and explore how they have framed DOHaD findings when communicating with and for policymakers. We analyse the social valences of these framings and make recommendations for framing DOHaD in ways that better align with social justice and health equity goals.
The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of scie... more The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of science and technology. Many public engagement initiatives aim to facilitate the formation of public opinion. But what is an opinion? While the notion is often taken as self-evident, different imaginaries of what opinions are and how they should be formed are highly consequential for shaping relations between technoscience and society. Based on participant observations and interviews, we analyze how “opinion” is enacted as an emergent object and category with specific properties and uses in a series of public engagement events on genome editing. By identifying two prevalent goals tied to partially conflicting imaginaries of opinion—open deliberation and “capturing” public opinion—our analysis contributes to a more reflective understanding of the tensions that participation facilitators navigate when making opinions their central points of intervention in the coevolving relationship between technologies and their publics.
This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far bee... more This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends—governance by buzzwords and projectification—often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as “diversity” become especially important in an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords (as typically vague terms that need to be fleshed out) are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a “doable” project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing “diversity.” We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice.
Korpergewicht als Thema scheint heutzutage allgegenwartig. In der vorliegenden Dissertation unter... more Korpergewicht als Thema scheint heutzutage allgegenwartig. In der vorliegenden Dissertation untersuche ich, wie Korpergewicht im Alltagsleben und in der Gesellschaft an Bedeutung gewinnt. Ich arbeite dabei mit Fokusgruppendiskussionen und qualitativen Interviews und betrachte diese als experimentelle Orte, in denen Korper und Subjekte innerhalb narrativer Praktiken konstituiert werden. Aufbauend auf Theorien der Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung, der Soziologie des Korpers sowie der Medizinsoziologie zeige ich, wie Korpergewichtsdiskurse und –praktiken nicht rein restriktiv sind: Sie konnen von Menschen produktiv gemacht werden, um das eigene verkorperte Sein in der Welt zu transformieren. Korpergewicht ist heutzutage eng damit verbunden, wie Menschen sich selbst und Andere als moralische Subjekte erleben. Dadurch wird die Arbeit am Korpergewicht zum Mittel, historisch kontingente Formen von Subjektivitat und Verkorperung zu performieren. Die Korperform und das Ausere erscheinen dabei als Aussagen uber die „innere Wahrheit“ der Person: als Ausdruck eines disziplinierten und verantwortlichen Selbst oder aber als Zeichen des moralischen Scheiterns eines Subjektes, dessen Korpergewicht nicht den hegemonialen Idealen entspricht. Die Macht von Korpergewichtsdiskursen und -praktiken liegt darin, dass sie die erfolgreiche Konstitution von Subjektivitat unter den herrschenden gesellschaftlichen und politischen Bedingungen gleichzeitig einschranken und ermoglichen. Darin liegen sowohl ihre gewalttatigen als auch ermachtigenden Potentiale, welche, obwohl sie gegensatzlich erscheinen, eng miteinander verbunden sind.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2022
The research field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) provides a framework fo... more The research field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) provides a framework for understanding how a wide range of environmental factors, such as deprivation, nutrition and stress, shape individual and population health over the course of a lifetime. DOHaD researchers face the challenge of how to conceptualize and measure ontologically diverse environments and their interactions with the developing organism over extended periods of time. Based on ethnographic research, I show how DOHaD researchers are often eager to capture what they regard as more 'complex' understandings of the environment in their work. At the same time, they are confronted with established methodological tools, disciplinary infrastructures and institutional contexts that favor simplistic articulations of the environment as distinct and mainly individual-level variables. I show how researchers struggle with these simplistic articulations of nutrition, maternal bodies and social determinants as relevant environments, which are sometimes at odds with the researchers' own normative commitments and aspirations.
Osteoporosis: a lifecourse epidemiology approach to skeletal health, 2018
This chapter describes the importance of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease concepts for... more This chapter describes the importance of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease concepts for understanding bone health and introduces perspectives from the social sciences, such as 'embodiment', as important complementary tools for understanding bone health as a biosocial matter. It proposes that such interdisciplinary approaches to bone formation and maintenance allow for a more holistic understanding of bone health and disease as well as for a more comprehensive perspective on the societal responsibility for bone health. For human development, however, the concept of 'maternal constraint' of fetal growth – a process in which maternal factors limit the growth of the fetus during development – has particular implications that are less widely known. The chapter concludes that interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for adequately addressing the complexity of both the biological and the social processes involved in bone health and disease and for promoting more equitable translations of scientific insights into policy practices.
Past, Present and Future Directions of Biosocial Collaboration, Jun 30, 2024
In the last decade, scholars in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have incr... more In the last decade, scholars in the Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) have increasingly engaged in translating the field’s insights into policy and society. Several multidisciplinary advocacy groups have been formed to promote women’s reproductive health as well as maternal and child health. They have framed DOHaD in different ways in order to attract policy attention. Framing is the practice of contextualising and interpreting the meaning of research results in various communication activities. Overall, DOHaD has often been shown to exhibit a narrow focus on individual responsibility and translation at the clinician–patient interface instead of focusing on wider socio-economic, cultural, and political factors influencing health in its framing activities. In this chapter, we examine two case studies of multidisciplinary networks (the Venice Forum and UK Preconception Partnership) and explore how they have framed DOHaD findings when communicating with and for policymakers. We analyse the social valences of these framings and make recommendations for framing DOHaD in ways that better align with social justice and health equity goals.
The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of scie... more The past decades have seen increasing calls to actively involve publics in the governance of science and technology. Many public engagement initiatives aim to facilitate the formation of public opinion. But what is an opinion? While the notion is often taken as self-evident, different imaginaries of what opinions are and how they should be formed are highly consequential for shaping relations between technoscience and society. Based on participant observations and interviews, we analyze how “opinion” is enacted as an emergent object and category with specific properties and uses in a series of public engagement events on genome editing. By identifying two prevalent goals tied to partially conflicting imaginaries of opinion—open deliberation and “capturing” public opinion—our analysis contributes to a more reflective understanding of the tensions that participation facilitators navigate when making opinions their central points of intervention in the coevolving relationship between technologies and their publics.
This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far bee... more This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends—governance by buzzwords and projectification—often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as “diversity” become especially important in an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords (as typically vague terms that need to be fleshed out) are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a “doable” project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing “diversity.” We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice.
Korpergewicht als Thema scheint heutzutage allgegenwartig. In der vorliegenden Dissertation unter... more Korpergewicht als Thema scheint heutzutage allgegenwartig. In der vorliegenden Dissertation untersuche ich, wie Korpergewicht im Alltagsleben und in der Gesellschaft an Bedeutung gewinnt. Ich arbeite dabei mit Fokusgruppendiskussionen und qualitativen Interviews und betrachte diese als experimentelle Orte, in denen Korper und Subjekte innerhalb narrativer Praktiken konstituiert werden. Aufbauend auf Theorien der Wissenschafts- und Technikforschung, der Soziologie des Korpers sowie der Medizinsoziologie zeige ich, wie Korpergewichtsdiskurse und –praktiken nicht rein restriktiv sind: Sie konnen von Menschen produktiv gemacht werden, um das eigene verkorperte Sein in der Welt zu transformieren. Korpergewicht ist heutzutage eng damit verbunden, wie Menschen sich selbst und Andere als moralische Subjekte erleben. Dadurch wird die Arbeit am Korpergewicht zum Mittel, historisch kontingente Formen von Subjektivitat und Verkorperung zu performieren. Die Korperform und das Ausere erscheinen dabei als Aussagen uber die „innere Wahrheit“ der Person: als Ausdruck eines disziplinierten und verantwortlichen Selbst oder aber als Zeichen des moralischen Scheiterns eines Subjektes, dessen Korpergewicht nicht den hegemonialen Idealen entspricht. Die Macht von Korpergewichtsdiskursen und -praktiken liegt darin, dass sie die erfolgreiche Konstitution von Subjektivitat unter den herrschenden gesellschaftlichen und politischen Bedingungen gleichzeitig einschranken und ermoglichen. Darin liegen sowohl ihre gewalttatigen als auch ermachtigenden Potentiale, welche, obwohl sie gegensatzlich erscheinen, eng miteinander verbunden sind.
Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 2022
The research field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) provides a framework fo... more The research field of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) provides a framework for understanding how a wide range of environmental factors, such as deprivation, nutrition and stress, shape individual and population health over the course of a lifetime. DOHaD researchers face the challenge of how to conceptualize and measure ontologically diverse environments and their interactions with the developing organism over extended periods of time. Based on ethnographic research, I show how DOHaD researchers are often eager to capture what they regard as more 'complex' understandings of the environment in their work. At the same time, they are confronted with established methodological tools, disciplinary infrastructures and institutional contexts that favor simplistic articulations of the environment as distinct and mainly individual-level variables. I show how researchers struggle with these simplistic articulations of nutrition, maternal bodies and social determinants as relevant environments, which are sometimes at odds with the researchers' own normative commitments and aspirations.
Osteoporosis: a lifecourse epidemiology approach to skeletal health, 2018
This chapter describes the importance of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease concepts for... more This chapter describes the importance of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease concepts for understanding bone health and introduces perspectives from the social sciences, such as 'embodiment', as important complementary tools for understanding bone health as a biosocial matter. It proposes that such interdisciplinary approaches to bone formation and maintenance allow for a more holistic understanding of bone health and disease as well as for a more comprehensive perspective on the societal responsibility for bone health. For human development, however, the concept of 'maternal constraint' of fetal growth – a process in which maternal factors limit the growth of the fetus during development – has particular implications that are less widely known. The chapter concludes that interdisciplinary collaboration is essential for adequately addressing the complexity of both the biological and the social processes involved in bone health and disease and for promoting more equitable translations of scientific insights into policy practices.
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Papers by Michael Penkler