Based on a case study in pulmonary medicine, this article demonstrates how a biological concept of race with roots in slavery persists in Swedish medicine, despite the established view that Sweden abandoned race after the Second World War in favour of a sociocultural concept of ethnicity, and despite widespread international criticism of algorithms that adjust for race. Through analyses of interviews, clinical guidelines, software manuals, research papers, clinical trials and international standards, we highlight how lung function measurements are based on assumptions of biologically grounded group differences in lung capacity, which influence the assessment of individuals' health. We also demonstrate how social and biological explanatory models become intertwined in ways that blur the boundary between race and ethnicity. We argue for the need for developing analytical tools in social science that can capture the flexible and contradictory expressions of the concept of race, while challenging the assumption that biological racial thinking exists only within far-right environments. We demonstrate how the use of outdated and biologising categorisations risks reproducing unequal healthcare and contributing to misdiagnosis, and we warn of the biopolitical consequences it may have in an increasingly racist social climate.
What constitutes ethical research, and which instruments are best suited to ensuring that research is conducted in accordance with existing rules and norms? In this article, we take a pragmatist approach to research ethics and investigate the ways that ethicality is constructed, negotiated, and affirmed in practice. To understand the ways that ethics are made in practice, we look to high-stakes discussions among expert practitioners: review panel discussions at a national research funder. We focus on review panels for artistic research, a relatively young and multidisciplinary research field, and analyze interactions around research ethics that we observed over the course of two annual funding cycles. By centering the creative and interpersonal process of asserting and negotiating what is and what is not ethical research, this study provides a bottom-up perspective on research ethics and seeks to contribute to ongoing discussions about the tensions and paradoxes that face qualitative research in the social sciences and the humanities under existing systems of ethics regulation and oversight in Sweden and beyond.
