Epistemic dwelling: precision immuno-oncology by design

Abstract

This paper details how the architectural features of a new cancer research center (henceforth “NCRC”) contribute to the alignment of different institutional settings, epistemic approaches and communities of practices around precision immuno-oncology. First, we show how the building’s designed emplacement produces an organizational change directed at accelerating the traffic of discoveries and the collaborations across basic research and clinical practice. Second, we focus on the contribution of the NCRC’s internal design (i.e. its laboratory spaces) to a larger spatial, epistemic and social (re)organization of (local) experimental practices of patient-tailored immunotherapies development. Our focus on the articulations of spaces, experimental systems and epistemic socialities allows us to characterize our observations of the NCRC as epistemic dwelling. This notion, we maintain, highlights how the NCRC goes beyond the physical networking of neighboring experimental practices and rather encompasses a generative process of co-habitation of a novel socio-spatial-technical unit of scientific activity.