Learning and Shaping Expert Knowledges: The Case of Precision Medicine

Abstract

The aim of this article – drawing on broad ethnographic research within two major Italian organisations operating in cancer care and research – is to enlarge practice-based studies, and in particular the practice-based approach to learning. To do so, a dialogue with social studies of biomedical science and health professions will be open, thus contributing to the field of sociology of scientific practice, which often neglected to explore how practitioners locate themselves in a position to be able to act as competent agents. Accordingly, we shall ask: what kind of knowledge is enacted to create a context of work in which "precision medicine" emerges? Since research and care practices as collective activities are not merely predefined by formal education and training, how practitioners learn to work together, and to shape knowledge actionable within a precision medicine frame? In addressing these research questions, the article shows how a practice-based approach to learning might offers novel modes of understanding biomedicine and to think somewhat differently about how expert knowledges are produced and shared among diverse settings and professionals.

Keywords

• practice theory
• biomedicine
• healthcare professions
• learning in practice
• ethnography