Papers by Michael Arribas-Ayllon
Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2017
There are many people, past and present, to whom I express my thanks: from those whose ideas with... more There are many people, past and present, to whom I express my thanks: from those whose ideas within the literature I have borrowed to reconstruct a living memory o f the past, and those whose experiences I have used to increase our understanding o f the present. Special thanks goes to twelve participants whose knowledge, memory and experience have provided ways o f thinking about the difficulties and possibilities o f living in the present. Without their contributions this work would have been lonelier and poorer. Thanks also goes to those who, in many ways, have made it possible to complete this project. Thanks to Heather whose kindness and support saw me through the darkest moments, and to Peter whose quiet advice and loyal comradeship help me through the challenges o f research. To my colleagues at the University o f Western Sydney, I am grateful for all the energetic discussions and critical insights that allowed this project to take its present form. Special thanks goes to Niamh Stephenson whose meticulous suggestions and rigorous intervention enabled a clearer formulation o f my ideas. Lastly, I want to extend my eternal gratitude to my supervisor, Valerie Walkerdine, whose clarity, patience and unwavering belief set me straight on many occasions, and without which, suffice to say, this project would never have seen the light o f day. In November 1999, the Australian Federal minister for Family and Community Services. Senator Jocelyn Newman, released a discussion paper on the Federal Government's proposal to reform the Australian welfare system. The paper, titled: The challenge of welfare dependency in the 21st century, signalled the Governm ent's intention to combat the growing incidence o f 'welfare dependency' among people o f workforce-age. Statistical indicators outlining 'the impact o f long-term dependency' showed a steady increase o f the workforce-age population in receipt o f income support (from approx. 10% in 1978 to 18% in 1998). despite sharp falls in unemployment rates since 1993 (over 10.5% in 1993 to 7.8% in 1998). Further, in June 1998. there was a reported four and three-quarter million Australians receiving income support payments, representing a five fold increase since 1965 (Newman, 1999a; 1999b). Excluding those in receipt o f payment above retirement age. or an additional 400,000 receiving student assistance, there were estimated to be over two and a quarter million people receiving some form o f income assistance in other categories. The most significant categories comprise o f those receiving unemployment allowances (35%). Disability Support Pension (24%) or Parenting Payment (27%). These three categories o f welfare assistance constitute the groups most 'at risk' o f long-term dependency, and form the main objects around which the future of Australia welfare is reformed. The past few decades have witnessed a disproportionate expansion o f these three target groups-the unemployed, the chronically ill/disabled, and the lone parent-where the number o f single parents receiving payments has increased by a factor o f tw elve since 1965: those receiving the Disability Support Pension have increased fivefold: and those on unemployment allowances have increased by a factor o f sixty (ie. from 13.000 in the mid-sixties to 790.000 by 1998). At present, the commonwealth government spends approximately 50 billion each year on welfare payments, representing a third o f all government expenditure. However, since the 1960's, welfare expenditure has risen much faster than rates o f population, economy and government revenue. Peter Saunders. Research Manager for the Australian Institute o f Family Studies, provides a succinct summary o f the current problem facing the Howard Government: Today, more than 18 percent o f the population o f workforce age is receiving income support payments as compared with just 3% in the early-and m id-sixties... GDP per head has doubled since 1960, the real value o f taxes has tripled, but the real cost o f welfare spending has gone up five-fold. It is not difficult to see why the government is worried about these trends (2000, p. 15). 8 Some critics claim archaeology w as abandoned by Foucault in favour o f the discovery o f the role o f power played in discourse. The concepts and categories he carefully constructed in The A rchaeology o f Knowledge were, according to Barry Smart, 'almost totally subverted' by Foucault's shift to genealogy, leaving the reader the ch oice o f 'archaeologist o f ideas or genealogist o f pow er' (1985, p.42). Jeffrey Minson, on the other hand, claim s that the reader o f Foucault's later genealogies must return to The A rchaeology o f K n ow ledge to put genealogy back on course (1985, p .l 15). For M inson, genealogy would have been a blind endeavour had he not archaeology to help it find its way. 41 There are four assumptions under which the salient features o f political oeconom y are recognised: (1) it relies upon a householding conception o f proper economic management; (2) it presupposes the absolute agency o f a sovereign or statesman prior to economic activity; (3) it assumes a patriarchal system o f relations among monarch and subjects, between the heads o f a households and their w ives, children, servants, and labourers; (4) and it presupposes a distributional problematic insofar as a w ise administration refers to the proper m aintenance o f all objects (population, persons, and things) internal to a territory (Tribe,
Genetic testing and human subjectivity
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, Jun 1, 2015
This article offers a brief overview of how methods of DNA testing are reframing what it means to... more This article offers a brief overview of how methods of DNA testing are reframing what it means to be a living being in a living world. It is no longer the case that genetic technologies objectify life in such a way as to deny something essential to human subjectivity. The style of reasoning of the life sciences today is characterised by complexity, dynamism and emergence. This requires rethinking the relationship between technology, society and subjectivity. Genetic testing is a social and symbolic practice through which notions of identity and relatedness are reconfigured in terms of being genetically at risk. Far from reducing subjectivity to one's biological destiny, genetic technologies have consequences in terms of not only governing others to govern their risk wisely, but also aligning conduct with Western liberal values of autonomy, responsibility and choice. New pastors and gatekeepers of genetic information have assembled around these technologies where psychology plays a key role in facilitating autonomy and instilling a sense of genetic responsibility. Nevertheless, the increasing capitalization of genomics is moving genetic testing beyond these clinical enclosures of control into the domain of consumer choice, creating new forms of subjectification, citizenship and community.
Genomics, society and policy, Aug 15, 2010
How should we reflect upon the last 10 years since the completion of the human genome? One domina... more How should we reflect upon the last 10 years since the completion of the human genome? One dominant response from within the humanities and the social sciences is to cast these events within a dialectic of promise and disappointment. Indeed, this contrast would seem to hold if we take Clinton's historic announcement as our point of departure. I choose an alternative departure: not in the rhetoric of press releases but from scientists' ambivalent accounts of complexity. Perhaps a dialectic of promise and complexity is a less pessimistic (but no less sceptical) way of reflecting on what has happened in the last 10 years. In this paper, I focus on two aspects of societal change within the 'urban zone': the rise of population-based biobanking and the marketisation of genetic susceptibility testing. Both developments are driven by the promise that genomic research will lead to new ways to 'prevent, diagnose, treat and cure disease'. However, genomic knowledge also reveals a level of complexity that has led to unprecedented scale in the production of granular information. In the last 10 years we have seen that traditional bioethics has struggled to cope with this scale. In the era of high-throughput sequencing and personal genomics, we have also seen that translating complexity into benefits for the health consumer is controversial. Arguably, ethical principles do not capture the subtle differences between predictive and susceptibility testing, and that more empirical research is needed to understand how people perceive and communicate complex risk information.
Social Science & Medicine, Jun 1, 2016
The concept of geneticization belongs to a style of thinking within the social sciences that refe... more The concept of geneticization belongs to a style of thinking within the social sciences that refers to wideranging processes and consequences of genetic knowledge. Lippman's original use of the term was political, anticipating the onerous consequences of genetic reductionism and determinism, while more recent engagements emphasise the productivity and heterogeneity of genetic concepts, practices and technologies. This paper reconstructs the geneticization concept, tracing it back to early political critiques of medicine. The argument is made that geneticization belongs to a style of constructionist thinking that obscures and exaggerates the essentializing effects of genetic knowledge. Following Hacking's advice, we need a more literal sense of construction in terms of 'assembly' to give a clearer account of the relationship between processes and products. Using the 'assemblage' concept to explore the social ontology of genetics, the paper reviews three areas of the empirical literature on geneticization e disease classification, clinical practice and biosociality e to show that a new style of thinking has appeared within the social sciences. In the final assessment, the conditions that gave rise to geneticization are now obsolete. While it may serve as a useful ritual of debate, conceptually geneticization offers a limited account of the heterogeneity of socio-technical change.
British Medical Bulletin, Jun 14, 2011
Introduction or background: Genetic testing for rare Mendelian disorders represents the dominant ... more Introduction or background: Genetic testing for rare Mendelian disorders represents the dominant ethical paradigm in clinical and professional practice. Predictive testing for Huntington's disease is the model against which other kinds of genetic testing are evaluated, including testing for Alzheimer's disease. Sources of data: This paper retraces the historical development of ethical reasoning in relation to predictive genetic testing and reviews a range of ethical, sociological and psychological literature from the 1970s to the present. Areas of agreement: In the past, ethical reasoning has embodied a distinct style whereby normative principles are developed from a dominant disease exemplar. Areas of controversy: This reductionist approach to formulating ethical frameworks breaks down in the case of disease susceptibility. Growing points: Recent developments in the genetics of Alzheimer's disease present a significant case for reconsidering the ethics of disclosing risk for common complex diseases. Disclosing the results of susceptibility testing for Alzheimer's disease has different social, psychological and behavioural consequences. Furthermore, what genetic susceptibility means to individuals and their families is diffuse and often mitigated by other factors and concerns. Areas timely for developing research: The ethics of disclosing a genetic diagnosis of susceptibility is contingent on whether professionals accept that probabilistic risk information is in fact 'diagnostic' and it will rely substantially on empirical evidence of how people actually perceive, recall and communicate complex risk information.
Caring through things at a distance: Intimacy and presence in teletherapy assemblages
Sociology of Health and Illness, Jun 14, 2023
The COVID‐19 crisis in the UK precipitated a sharp rise in the use of remote technologies to prov... more The COVID‐19 crisis in the UK precipitated a sharp rise in the use of remote technologies to provide therapy during the lockdown. With mental health care services migrating to devices and video‐conferencing platforms, nearly all forms of therapy had become ‘teletherapy’. Drawing on interviews with UK‐based practitioners, this paper explores how existing ideas of intimacy and presence are challenged when care is practiced at a distance. Against the background of concerns that remote technologies erode intimacy and degrade physical presence, the argument is made that presence, distance, intimacy and control are reconfigured within mediated therapy. Analysis of practitioners’ experiences of teletherapy examines the material and expressive components of ‘assemblages’ characterised by their stable and fluid properties. Two assemblages are identified and discussed: emergency care assemblages and assemblages of intimacy, both of which are aligned with specific sectors of mental health care. Evidence that therapeutic encounters are constrained by technologies are considered alongside the material conditions and inequalities of vulnerable groups, while assemblages with relatively stable properties are generative of new ways of relating to clients online. These findings highlight the material and expressive components of human and nonhuman assemblages that create new kinds of affective relations in distanced care.
Book Review: Lia Litosseliti (ed), Research Methods in Linguistics
Qualitative Research, Jan 29, 2013
Like all disciplines within the human sciences, the field of linguistics has a familiar paradigm ... more Like all disciplines within the human sciences, the field of linguistics has a familiar paradigm story. Once entrenched in the absolutes of positivism, structuralism and psychologism, it tells the story of a discipline that became methodologically and epistemologically diverse and critical. It is sometimes assumed, I think, that paradigm change occurs because of some deep inconsistency between theory and reality, eventually collapsing under the weight of its own contradictions. The healthy paradigm is not a ‘body of theory’ that subsumes (or ‘sublates’ as Hegel would put it) all contradictions into a narrative of progress. This is the zombie version of paradigm – a veritable monolith of dead ideas. A paradigm is the living ensemble of research programmes, embodied by practitioners, researchers, methods, devices, instruments and, above all, practices, which are very much alive and which seek to tell, for the most part, a coherent story about the world. The health of a paradigm is measured not by the quality and consistency of its theory but by the vitality and productivity of its methods. Whatever we want to call this ‘new paradigm’, it is clear that method itself has become the motor of human inquiry. ‘The result is’, according to Patti Lather (1986), ‘a constructive turmoil that allows a search for different possibilities of making sense of human life, for other ways of knowing which do justice to the complexity, tenuity, and indeterminacy of most of human experience’ (p. 259). I believe that Research Methods in Linguistics is a symptom of how the field of linguistics is faring with this ‘constructive turmoil’. All this paradigm-talk is central to understanding the diversity and innovation of contemporary linguistic research as well as the implicit tensions within it. The editor describes the purpose of this collection ‘as an essential up-to-date one-stop resource for researchers and graduates students’ (p. 1). In a superficial sense, each chapter provides a gloss of different research approaches involving statistical and corpus linguistics, discourse and narrative analysis, interviews and focus groups, social semiotics and multi-modal research. In a much deeper sense, most of the chapters offer adequate contextualisation by rehearsing the key debates that have shaped these approaches. The resulting balance between a ‘shopping menu’ and a ‘potted review’ of research methods is useful and effective. The collection is organised in three logical parts, which is particularly beneficial for graduate students. Part I deals with research questions and the issue of mixing qualitative 442872QRJ0010.1177/1468794112442872Qualitative ResearchBook reviews 2013
Personalized Medicine and Promissory Science
Elsevier eBooks, 2012
This article explores the rise of personalized medicine as a discursive and historical phenomenon... more This article explores the rise of personalized medicine as a discursive and historical phenomenon. The task of applied ethical inquiry is one of engaging in the technical and promissory claims of scientists rather than simply taking their claims at face value. This leads to a stronger understanding of one particular commercial offshoot of personalized medicine – the personal genomics industry. The availability of direct-to-consumer genetic susceptibility testing is considered from several perspectives: the evaluation of genetic tests, the marketization of genomic knowledge, and the relationship between complex genetic risk and behavior change. In conclusion, personalized medicine is treated as a symptom of neoliberal capitalism.
Genealogy and the subject of welfare: a question of which techniques?
Ambient intelligence : a narrative in search of users (discussion paper)
The vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) was first developed in the late 1990s. It describes new ... more The vision of Ambient Intelligence (AmI) was first developed in the late 1990s. It describes new worlds, economies and paradigms that emphasize the centrality of human experience, however, distinguished from related visions such as ubiquitous and pervasive computing. A key feature of the AmI vision are the seamless intelligent environments and gadgets, capable of anticipating people’s needs and motivations, and acting autonomously on their behalf. So what can be gleaned from exploring the conditions under which this innovation domain evolves over time and how it adapts to various criticisms and technical challenges? The AmI vision not only represents possible futures but actively creates the worlds in which AmI applications appear to be possible. Visionaries and research leaders build expectations, marshal resources and align key stakeholders. Promises and progressions toward realizing AmI have performative and generative features but the original promise of intelligence has largely...
Foucauldian Discourse Analysis
SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks, 2008
Genetic Testing
1. Introduction 2. Genetic Testing: Technology in Context 3. Neo-liberalism and the New Genetics ... more 1. Introduction 2. Genetic Testing: Technology in Context 3. Neo-liberalism and the New Genetics 4. Rhetorical Discourse Analysis 5. Personal Genomics and the Media 6. Family Accounts of Genetic Responsibility 7. Accounts of Genetic Testing in the Clinic 8. Professional Accounts of Ethical Challenges in Prenatal Clinic 9. Conclusion
The rhetoric of complexity
Expert Systems With Applications, Nov 1, 2015
In this paper we investigate the role of idioms in automated approaches to sentiment analysis. To... more In this paper we investigate the role of idioms in automated approaches to sentiment analysis. To estimate the degree to which the inclusion of idioms as features may potentially improve the results of traditional sentiment analysis, we compared our results to two such methods. First, to support idioms as features we collected a set of 580 idioms that are relevant to sentiment analysis, i.e. the ones that can be mapped to an emotion. These mappings were then obtained using a web-based crowdsourcing approach. The quality of the crowdsourced information is demonstrated with high agreement among five independent annotators calculated using Krippendorff's alpha coefficient (a = 0.662). Second, to evaluate the results of sentiment analysis, we assembled a corpus of sentences in which idioms are used in context. Each sentence was annotated with an emotion, which formed the basis for the gold standard used for the comparison against two baseline methods. The performance was evaluated in terms of three measures-precision, recall and F-measure. Overall, our approach achieved 64% and 61% for these three measures in two experiments improving the baseline results by 20 and 15 percent points respectively. F-measure was significantly improved over all three sentiment polarity classes: Positive, Negative and Other. Most notable improvement was recorded in classification of positive sentiments, where recall was improved by 45 percent points in both experiments without compromising the precision. The statistical significance of these improvements was confirmed by McNemar's test.
Journal of Classification, May 10, 2019
In this paper we investigated the utility of different classification schemes for emotive languag... more In this paper we investigated the utility of different classification schemes for emotive language analysis with the aim of providing experimental justification for the choice of scheme for classifying emotions in free text. We compared six schemes: (1) Ekman's six basic emotions, (2) Plutchik's wheel of emotion, (3) Watson and Tellegen's Circumplex theory of affect, (4) the Emotion Annotation Representation Language (EARL), (5) WordNet-Affect, and (6) free text. To measure their utility, we investigated their ease of use by human annotators as well as the performance of supervised machine learning. We assembled a corpus of 500 emotionally charged text documents. The corpus was annotated manually using an online crowdsourcing platform with five independent annotators per document. Assuming that classification schemes with a better balance between completeness and complexity are easier to interpret and use, we expect such schemes to be associated with higher inter-annotator agreement. We used Krippendorff's alpha coefficient to measure inter-annotator agreement according to which the six classification schemes were ranked as follows: (1) six basic emotions (α = 0.483), (2) wheel of emotion (α = 0.410), (3) Circumplex (α = 0.312), EARL (α = 0.286), (5) free text (α = 0.205), and (6) WordNet-Affect (α = 0.202). However, correspondence analysis of annotations across the schemes highlighted that basic emotions are oversimplified representations of complex phenomena and as such likely to lead to invalid interpretations, which are not necessarily reflected by high inter-annotator
Journal of Genetic Counseling, Jul 24, 2016
Genetic counselling is not routinely offered for psychiatric disorders in the United Kingdom thro... more Genetic counselling is not routinely offered for psychiatric disorders in the United Kingdom through NHS regional clinical genetics departments. However, recent genomic advances, confirming a genetic contribution to mental illness, are anticipated to increase demand for psychiatric genetic counselling. This is the first study of its kind to employ qualitative methods of research to explore accounts of psychiatric health professionals regarding the prospects for genetic counselling services within clinical psychiatry in the UK. Data were collected from 32 questionnaire participants, and 9 subsequent interviewees. Data analysis revealed that although participants had not encountered patients explicitly demanding psychiatric genetic counselling, psychiatric health professionals believe that such a service would be useful and desirable. Genomic advances may have significant implications for genetic counselling in clinical psychiatry even if these discoveries do not lead to genetic testing. Psychiatric health professionals describe clinical genetics as a skilled profession capable of combining complex risk communication with much needed psychosocial support. However, participants noted barriers to the implementation of psychiatric genetic counselling services including, but not limited to, the complexities of uncertainty in psychiatric diagnoses, patient engagement and ethical concerns regarding limited capacity.
Journal of Genetic Counseling, Feb 10, 2009
Childhood genetic testing raises complex ethical and moral dilemmas for both families and profess... more Childhood genetic testing raises complex ethical and moral dilemmas for both families and professionals. In the family sphere, the role of communication is a key aspect in the transmission of `genetic responsibility' between adults and children. In the professional sphere, genetic responsibility is an interactional accomplishment emerging from competing views over what constitutes the `best interests' of the child in relation to parental preferences on the one hand, and professional codes of practice on the other. In the present paper we extend our previous research into parental accounts of childhood genetic testing and explore the ethical explanations/descriptions of professionals in research interviews. Interviews (n=20) were conducted with professional practitioners involved in the genetic diagnosis and management of children and their families. We first identify four interrelated themesjuxtaposition of parental rights vis-à-vis child's autonomy, elicitation of the child's autonomy, avoidance of parental responsibility and acknowledgement of uncertainty-and then, using Rhetorical Discourse Analysis, examine the range of devices through which ethical explanations are situationally illustrated: contrast, reported speech, constructed dialogue, character and event work. An important device for facilitating ethical explanations is the use of extreme case scenarios which reconstructs dilemmas as justifications of professional conduct. While acknowledging ambivalence, our analysis of professional accounts suggests that ethical practice is not a simple matter of implementing principles but managing the practical consequences of interactions with parents and children. We conclude that more attention is needed to understand the way professional practitioners construct and share cases as useful illustrations of evidence-based ethical practice.
Biomedical informatics insights, 2012
The authors present a system developed for the 2011 i2b2 Challenge on Sentiment Classification, w... more The authors present a system developed for the 2011 i2b2 Challenge on Sentiment Classification, whose aim was to automatically classify sentences in suicide notes using a scheme of 15 topics, mostly emotions. The system combines machine learning with a rule-based methodology. The features used to represent a problem were based on lexico-semantic properties of individual words in addition to regular expressions used to represent patterns of word usage across different topics. A naïve Bayes classifier was trained using the features extracted from the training data consisting of 600 manually annotated suicide notes. Classification was then performed using the naïve Bayes classifier as well as a set of pattern-matching rules. The classification performance was evaluated against a manually prepared gold standard consisting of 300 suicide notes, in which 1,091 out of a total of 2,037 sentences were associated with a total of 1,272 annotations. The competing systems were ranked using the micro-averaged F-measure as the primary evaluation metric. Our system achieved the F-measure of 53% (with 55% precision and 52% recall), which was significantly better than the average performance of 48.75% achieved by the 26 participating teams.
Counselling uncertainty: genetics professionals’ accounts of (non)directiveness and trust/distrust
Health Risk & Society, Feb 17, 2014
In genetic counselling, uncertainty is central to the client–professional relationship where deci... more In genetic counselling, uncertainty is central to the client–professional relationship where decisions are made on the basis of risk information/assessment. For various historical reasons, genetic counsellors adopt an ethos of ‘nondirectiveness’ to communicate risk and offer support without advising their clients on what decisions to reach. However, nondirectiveness remains an ambiguous and contested concept that has acquired a negative meaning of ‘not influencing clients’ or ‘adopting an indifferent stance’. We argue that nondirectiveness also implies a positive sense of acknowledging genetic counselling as a process of influence. Drawing on interview data (n = 25) involving professionals from England and South Wales (UK), accounts of genetic testing indicate a dynamic relationship between managing uncertainty on the one hand and negotiating trust and distrust on the other. In the counselling process, trusting and distrusting are coexisting techniques of assessing clients’ motivations, expectations and reasons for genetic testing. Using rhetorical discourse analysis as our analytical approach, we identify a pattern of accounting whereby professionals justify a directive stance when they are not confident whether clients have considered the uncertainty of the situation. More than a veneer of neutrality and indifference, we argue that nondirectiveness is a technique by which genetics professionals explore whether clients can be trusted to make autonomous decisions within a climate of uncertainty. Eliciting confidence and establishing trust within the context of genetic counselling are enabling, pastoral strategies for configuring risk and emotion.
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Papers by Michael Arribas-Ayllon