Dr Eva Hilberg

Eva is interested in the politics of health priorities, both for individual and collective conceptions of health. These processes can create tensions and give rise to new ways of governing for example at the intersection between health and economics, or in the emergence of entirely new priorities for global health. Eva’s previous research projects studied the biopolitical dimension of the international regime of intellectual property rights on human genetic materials (‘Gene Patents’); patient activism and the use of digital media; the increasing focus on mental health within global health policies; and ongoing responses to governing an uncertain event such as the coronavirus pandemic. These projects focused especially on instances of ‘black boxing’ as priorities are translated into specific parameters for digital devices and algorithms. Intellectual property constitutes a similar epistemic object reflecting struggles between different scientific conceptions and interests. Ongoing research projects analyse the global response to the coronavirus pandemic; the attempts at governing uncertain future risks such as viral outbreaks; and the dynamics of patient activism in the field of orphan diseases.

A secondary interest is the exploration of poetry as a participatory method for the engagement of marginalised voices, further expanding the notion of poetry as a practice that generates possibilities, enables us to think otherwise, and thus can improve participatory structures in different fields of social and political life, especially for those that are routinely excluded from formulating priorities (i.e. patients and the pharmaceutical industry; patient/survivors and conceptions of mental health).

Eva is interested in collaborations and initiatives in the following areas:

• The biopolitics of patient activism
• Instruments of health economics, especially intellectual property
• The making of Global Health priorities
• Global Health Security and genetic risk
• Digital technologies and health
• The politics of molecular conceptions of life
• The intersection between International Relations and International Law
• Foucauldian methods and Critical Theory
• Poetry as a participatory practice