Richard Tutton

I characterize my work as being at the intersection of medical sociology and the social studies of science (or STS - Science and Technology Studies). My work has centred on the governance of new medical technologies, changing forms of citizenship, patient participation, and identity practices in relation to genetic knowledge, biopolitics, and, more recently the role of expectations in science and technology.

My current research centres on "personalized medicine", which is a powerful vision of how biomedicine and healthcare is changing to customize forms of knowledge and interventions to different groups of patients and consumers.

I am currently working on a book that takes a historically informed approach to how visions of personalized medicine have been constructed in different scientific, commercial and political arenas. I locate the rise of personalized medicine within a broader trend of 'biomedicalization' (Clarke et al 2010) that entails the stratification of patients according to both emerging genotypic and established social categories. I am documenting and examining the ways in which a range of actors have sought to realize their visions pf personalized medicine across a number of interreated arenas.