Abstract This article explores the practical and material configurations of the ‘person(al)’ in experimental cancer immune therapy, where immune cells from the patient’s cancer tissue are used to eliminate incurable cancers. Drawing on ethnography from Denmark, we examine personal cancer immune therapy as a carefully steered practice—a choreography—through which tissues and cells originating from the same person are reconfigured in unpredictable ways. Cancer tissue, conventionally perceived as a dangerous ‘other’, holds the potential to act as a lifesaving ‘self’ in the form of a personal cure. Conversely, T-cells, conventionally perceived as protectors of the embodied ‘self’, can act as life-threatening ‘others’, endangering the person from whom they originated. We develop the notion of ‘choreographies of nearness’ to analyse how immunological and ontological relations are enacted in the clinical and experimental practices of personal cancer immune therapies. Tracing the execution of clinical protocols in ethnographic detail, we show that this emerging medical practice involves choreographies through which tissues and cells are enacted as neither strictly self nor other, but as ‘ near ’ the embodied person from whom they derive. Unpacking the potential of the ‘near self’, we expose the laborious and high-stakes ways of doing the ‘person(al)’ in this therapy.

Abstract This article examines the development and integration of predictive artificial intelligence (AI) in clinical cardiology in Denmark. Employing a conceptual lens of nearness , I analyze how researchers and cardiologists unsettle and redraw boundaries between human and artificial intelligence. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on the CARDIA IHD algorithm, which predicts survival prognoses for patients hospitalized with ischemic heart disease, I demonstrate how AI is alternately enacted as a near-human ‘wingman’ or ‘butler’ and as an inferior, subhuman tool. While researchers rhetorically position the algorithm as a potential and valuable substitute to human reasoning, in clinical practice, its sometimes clinically unintelligible predictions lead cardiologists to disengage from it and exclude it from their decision-making. I argue that, for algorithms to acquire near-human qualities in practice, they depend on human hosts who experience affective-moral obligations and who are called to substitute for and care for the inadequacies of ‘artificial’ intelligence. The paper advances nearness as an analytical framework for examining transformations in how the category of the human is understood, experienced, and enacted in biomedical research and clinical care, particularly in contexts promoted to entangle human and ‘artificial’ intelligence.

Abstract This article explores the unexpected connections that emerge between lithium mining plans in Serbia and two mass shootings on the 3rd and 4th of May 2023. The 3rd of May event was the first school shooting in the history of the wider region, becoming for many Serbians a manifestation of systemic issues rather than an isolated event, and resulting in the formation of a massive protest movement. The Jadar Project was set to become the biggest lithium mine in Europe, yet it has attracted widespread resistance across the country, resulting in its cancellation in January 2022, which was, however, nullified two and a half years later. Drawing on ethnographic and activist engagement with communities affected by lithium exploration in Serbia, this article explores how the two protest movements intersected around the question of violence. I theorise ‘violent politics' as encompassing multiple and shifting forms of violence that arise between lithium extractivism and the shootings and beyond, arguing for the need to conceptually connect various forms of violence. Moving beyond understanding violence through isolated events then problematises the binary thinking between chronic and acute violence, or material and immaterial toxicity, instead revealing it as fluid and porous—yet still being resisted.

Abstract Health measurement shapes peoples’ political relationships with the state, with services, with one another, and with oneself. But what are the political dynamics at play when people can’t/won’t/don’t have health measurements taken? And what is the political predicament of those whose needs, values, and experiences don’t fit within the measures available? This paper presents a case study of one youth mental health service’s efforts to improve their collection of outcome measures, and reinvigorates the concept of ‘sick role’ to describe young people as defying the ‘data roles’ expected of them. The concept of data roles draws attention to the political dynamics of measurement on two interlinked scales: the interpersonal, embodied measurement encounter; and the systemic care-measurement assemblage. In the case reported here, measures are hard to collect given the ‘routinized intimacy’ required, and the restrictive, normative, individualised understandings of need inscribed within available measures. Yet defying measurement equates to a marginalised, precarious political position for young people and for the services that support them. In sum, the data roles expected of young people ask too much of them, and do too little for them.

Abstract The vexed ‘psychotomimetic model’ of psychedelics claims to offer insights into both psychedelic experiences and psychosis, by weaving across these sets of experiences. One enduring opposition to the model distinguishes between psychedelic experiences as voluntary or ‘willed’, and psychosis as an affliction to be endured. This opposition is useful for projects seeking to sanitise and commodify psychedelics as part of emerging therapeutic interventions. This article draws on literature from psychedelic therapeutics, alongside mad studies, phenomenological psychiatry, and proceedings from a conference at their intersections, to destabilise the opposition between willed psychedelic experiences and unwilled psychosis. Through the paradoxical formulation of psychedelic therapy as willful surrender, I consider the central role accorded to trust, curiosity, openness, and letting go in modes of engaging with extreme experiences, whether pathologised or otherwise. In turn this reveals assumptions of the presumed liberal subject of psychedelic therapy, and brings psychedelic medicalisation into uncomfortable proximity with the very boundary violations it is seeking to avoid.

Abstract Through an ethnographic study of snakebite governance in Kerala, India, this article argues that social scientific theories of toxicity elucidate the biosocial dimensions of snakebite envenomation (SBE). SBE is a medical emergency engendered by the toxins in a venomous snakebite. By drawing upon work from the social sciences and humanities that conceives of the material and semiotic dimensions of biological toxins (such as venom and poison) and synthetic toxicants (such as industrial contaminants) in an integrated frame of toxicity, this article demonstrates how these theories clarify the structural drivers, indeterminacies, and multispecies health impacts that characterise SBE’s manifestation as a public health issue in Kerala. It thus asserts the value of integrating insights drawn from analyses of toxicity across biological and synthetic molecules, responding to recent influential reviews that omit biological toxins from this frame due to their supposed natural genesis and constrained circulation and harms. This article consequently argues that scholars should avoid reproducing rigid taxonomic distinctions between ‘natural’ toxins and ‘synthetic’ toxicants, as insights drawn from across classes of molecules and mobilised within a unified heuristic of toxicity elucidate the structural conditions and localised experiences of toxin and toxicant exposure.