Skip to main content

Jenny Brian

Arizona State University, Barrett Honors College, Faculty Member

Followers

171

Following

207

Co-authors

3

Public Views

I am Faculty Chair and Teaching Professor at Barrett, the Honors College at ASU. I teach the freshman seminar, The Human Event, as well as upper-level bioethics and science policy seminars. Previously, I held a position as an assistant professor at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh, where I taught in the Politics, Philosophy and Economics program, the Biological Sciences program, and the Public Health program.

I completed my PhD in Biology (with a concentration in Biology & Society and a specialization in Bioethics, Policy & Law) at Arizona State University. I studied bioethics committees in for-profit private sector bioscience corporations. Private sector bioethics is a question mark in the larger ecology of bioethics. It has been dismissed by many, yet it has replicated features of public bioethics. Bioethics programs in the private sector struggle with many of the same problems as public sector bioethics programs, with respect to mandate, authority, membership, and legitimacy, but, I argue, represent an important innovation in the governance of emerging technologies, with corporations taking a lead role in deciding what is ethically appropriate or problematic.

My overall research program seeks to explore the role of corporations in shaping normative debates and decision-making in science and technology.
Phone: 480-727-3592
Address: Barrett, The Honors College
Arizona State University
PO Box 871612
Tempe, AZ 85287-1612

less

National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University

University of Toronto

University of Notre Dame

Andrea Kalfoglou

University of Maryland Baltimore County

King's College London

Saint Joseph's University

Bethany Spielman

Francis. Fukuyama

InterestsView All (22)

Uploads

Papers by Jenny Brian

What's the Use? Disparate Purposes of U.S. Federal Bioethics Commissions

Hastings Center Report, 2017

Intersectionality and Science and Technology Studies

Science, Technology & Human Values, 2023

Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understand... more Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely non-overlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability to feminist studies and other social justice-oriented fields.

My Contraceptive Choice: A Decision Support Tool for College Women

MEDINFO 2021: One World, One Health – Global Partnership for Digital Innovation

We developed an online decision aid, My Contraceptive Choice (MCC), for college women to select t... more We developed an online decision aid, My Contraceptive Choice (MCC), for college women to select the appropriate birth control methods. MCC consists of a short quiz, customized recommendations, and educational resources. Evaluations from a focus group, an online survey, and test cases showed that the tool is accurate, usable, and useful. Future work is required to further improve MCC’s compliance with user needs/preferences and to include additional resources to make it more useful.

Development of an Online Contraceptive Decision Aid for College Women

AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium, 2021

Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misu... more Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misuse of these methods by young women. The existing online tools for contraceptive decisions have flaws. To address this critical need, we developed a prototype online contraception decision aid for college women. For this purpose, we conducted a focus group interview for needs assessment. We designed a scoring system to provide accurate and customized recommendations based on a user's preferences. We implemented the tool with specific functions to collect users' needs and preferences in selecting specific contraceptive methods, to present the customized recommendations, to provide side-by-side comparison of all contraceptive methods, and to recommend additional resources. Preliminary data seem to indicate positive evaluations of the tool. Future work is required to examine the generalizability of the findings and to have full implementations of the tool for real world use.

The age of LARC: making sexual citizens on the frontiers of technoscientific healthism

Health Sociology Review, 2020

Routinely positioned as the 'first-line option' for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reve... more Routinely positioned as the 'first-line option' for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) promotion efforts have come under critical scrutiny by reproductive justice advocates for the extent to which public health actors' preference for LARC devices may override potential users' ability to freely (not) choose to use contraception among an array of options. We identify LARC promotion discourse as constituting 'The Age of LARC': multifarious strategies for producing responsible sexual citizens whose health behaviours are empowered via a LARC-only approach to contraceptive use. We suggest that immediate postpartum LARC insertion policies, which have proliferated in the U.S. since 2012, exemplify the new era of LARC hegemony, in which urgency, efficiency, costeffectiveness, and outcomes dominate both health policy and clinical practice around these contraceptive technologies. By following these efforts to facilitate access to and use of immediate postpartum LARC, we find a discourse on sexual citizenship that paradoxically constructs sexual health freedom through the use of a single class of contraceptive technologies.

Clinical Encounters: The Social Justice Question in Intersectional Medicine

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019

Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences: Case Studies of Policy Challenges from New Technologies

The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2008

The age of LARC: making sexual citizens on the frontiers of technoscientific healthism

Health Sociology Review, 2020

Routinely positioned as the ‘first-line option’ for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reve... more Routinely positioned as the ‘first-line option’ for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) promotion efforts have come under critical scrutiny by reproductive justice advocates for the extent to which public health actors’ preference for LARC devices may override potential users’ ability to freely (not) choose to use contraception among an array of options. We identify LARC promotion discourse as constituting ‘The Age of LARC’: multifarious strategies for producing responsible sexual citizens whose health behaviours are empowered via a LARC-only approach to contraceptive use. We suggest that immediate postpartum LARC insertion policies, which have proliferated in the U.S. since 2012, exemplify the new era of LARC hegemony, in which urgency, efficiency, cost- effectiveness, and outcomes dominate both health policy and clinical practice around these contraceptive technologies. By following these efforts to facilitate access to and use of immediate postpartum LARC, we find a discourse on sexual citizenship that paradoxically constructs sexual health freedom through the use of a single class of contraceptive technologies.

My Bioethics Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be [Bleep]

by Jenny Brian, Patrick R Grzanka, and Janet Shim

Danis, Williams, and White (2016) argue that bioethicists have been glaringly absent from ongoing... more Danis, Williams, and White (2016) argue that bioethicists have been glaringly absent from ongoing social movements to combat racism, particularly the institutional and systematic oppression of African Americans in the United States. They assert that bioethics is uniquely positioned to promote antiracism in scholarship, training, and advocacy. In our title, we borrow from Flavia Dzoden’s (2011) (in)famous assertion about the importance of attending to “intersectionality” in the study and contestation of oppression. Intersectionality theory, rooted in Black feminist thought, has illuminated the weaknesses of social justice movements that conceptualize systems of inequality as discrete or parallel rather than intertwined. While we concur with Danis et al.’s assertions and share their commitment to an interdisciplinary bioethics that is rooted in social justice, we suggest that an intersectional approach would greatly enhance their prescription for bioethical antiracism. Innovative work in bioethics and related fields (e.g., medical sociology, science & technology studies) – including some of own scholarship – has demonstrated that race and racism are co-constituted by various intersecting forms of social inequality, including but not limited to sexism, capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, and globalization/neocolonialism. We outline the key analytic and political strengths of intersectionality theory and specify how Danis et al.’s recommendations may better attend to racism’s causes and material effects when infused with intersectional perspectives. We argue that intersectional antiracism should be at the center of bioethics – a more potent antiracism that attends to the empirical realities of racism’s collusion with intersecting systems of inequality.

Special perspectives section: responsible research and innovation for synthetic biology

I was the guest editor for a special section of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. Check out ... more

"Critiquing Culture from the Sidelines, a Conversation on Football, Cultural Critique, Ethics, and Collective Action." Culture in Conversation.

by Mary Ingram-Waters and Jenny Brian

Culture in Conversation, 2014

The Machine in the Garden of Desire

by Jenny Brian and Patrick R Grzanka

AJOB Neuroscience, Jan 2014

Bioethics and politics: Rules of engagement

The American Journal of Bioethics, Jan 29, 2009

Canada's stem cell corporation: Aggregate concerns and the question of public trust

Journal of Business Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

This paper examines one nascent entrepreneurial endeavour intended by Canada's Stem Cell Network ... more This paper examines one nascent entrepreneurial endeavour intended by Canada's Stem Cell Network to catalyze the commercialization of stem cell research: the creation of a company called ''Aggregate Therapeutics''. We argue that this initiative, in its current configuration, is likely to result in a breach of public trust owing to three inter-related concerns: conflicts of interest; corporate influence on the university research agenda; and the failure to provide some form of direct return for the public's substantial tax dollar investment. These concerns are common to many efforts to commercialize academic science but are rendered particularly acute in this case given the therapeutic promise of stem cell research and the considerable number of resources related to stem cell research in Canada, which Aggregate Therapeutics is expected to pool. We do, however, believe that the company can be altered to guard against a violation of the public's trust, and so we present concrete modifications to its structure, which we contend should be given immediate consideration.

The personal and interpersonal issues of egg donation

This article considers the implications of Canada's new legislation, Bill C-6: An act respecting ... more This article considers the implications of Canada's new legislation, Bill C-6: An act respecting assisted human reproduction and related research, for future oocyte donors and recipients. Specifically, this article explores the prohibition of payment to donors for oocyte donation, from the perspective of a paid oocyte donor.

Book Reviews by Jenny Brian

Review: Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences: Case Studies of Policy Challenges from New Technologies

Quarterly Review of Biology, Dec 2008

Biotechnology, bioethics, and the future: a review of Ronald Bailey's Liberation biology

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Jan 1, 2008

What's the Use? Disparate Purposes of U.S. Federal Bioethics Commissions

Hastings Center Report, 2017

Intersectionality and Science and Technology Studies

Science, Technology & Human Values, 2023

Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understand... more Over the past 30 years, intersectionality has become a nearly ubiquitous framework for understanding, critiquing, and intervening in complex social inequalities. Emerging from critical race and feminist studies, intersectionality has many shared analytic priorities with science and technology studies (STS), including an emphasis on co-emergent social forces, historical contingency, and interventions that challenge and enhance knowledge production. Despite these shared affinities, STS and intersectionality remain largely non-overlapping scholarly discourses. Based on a systematic review of intersectionality in eight STS journals, we observe a slight increase in intersectionality’s usage over time but find that its relevance is contained largely to venues outside of the STS mainstream. Our study identifies some ways STS scholars have modeled intersectionality’s responsible use through citation practices, methodological integration, and normative claims about justice/injustice. We also consider what epistemic exclusion of intersectionality might foreclose. We argue that increased use of intersectionality would amplify engagement with justice in STS work not only by introducing new questions and theoretical frames but also opening possibilities for new interdisciplinary formations. This is not simply an argument for greater inclusion of a term, but rather for transformation in epistemic accountability to feminist studies and other social justice-oriented fields.

My Contraceptive Choice: A Decision Support Tool for College Women

MEDINFO 2021: One World, One Health – Global Partnership for Digital Innovation

We developed an online decision aid, My Contraceptive Choice (MCC), for college women to select t... more We developed an online decision aid, My Contraceptive Choice (MCC), for college women to select the appropriate birth control methods. MCC consists of a short quiz, customized recommendations, and educational resources. Evaluations from a focus group, an online survey, and test cases showed that the tool is accurate, usable, and useful. Future work is required to further improve MCC’s compliance with user needs/preferences and to include additional resources to make it more useful.

Development of an Online Contraceptive Decision Aid for College Women

AMIA ... Annual Symposium proceedings. AMIA Symposium, 2021

Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misu... more Lack of knowledge in highly efficient contraceptive methods led to low rates of adoption and misuse of these methods by young women. The existing online tools for contraceptive decisions have flaws. To address this critical need, we developed a prototype online contraception decision aid for college women. For this purpose, we conducted a focus group interview for needs assessment. We designed a scoring system to provide accurate and customized recommendations based on a user's preferences. We implemented the tool with specific functions to collect users' needs and preferences in selecting specific contraceptive methods, to present the customized recommendations, to provide side-by-side comparison of all contraceptive methods, and to recommend additional resources. Preliminary data seem to indicate positive evaluations of the tool. Future work is required to examine the generalizability of the findings and to have full implementations of the tool for real world use.

The age of LARC: making sexual citizens on the frontiers of technoscientific healthism

Health Sociology Review, 2020

Routinely positioned as the 'first-line option' for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reve... more Routinely positioned as the 'first-line option' for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) promotion efforts have come under critical scrutiny by reproductive justice advocates for the extent to which public health actors' preference for LARC devices may override potential users' ability to freely (not) choose to use contraception among an array of options. We identify LARC promotion discourse as constituting 'The Age of LARC': multifarious strategies for producing responsible sexual citizens whose health behaviours are empowered via a LARC-only approach to contraceptive use. We suggest that immediate postpartum LARC insertion policies, which have proliferated in the U.S. since 2012, exemplify the new era of LARC hegemony, in which urgency, efficiency, costeffectiveness, and outcomes dominate both health policy and clinical practice around these contraceptive technologies. By following these efforts to facilitate access to and use of immediate postpartum LARC, we find a discourse on sexual citizenship that paradoxically constructs sexual health freedom through the use of a single class of contraceptive technologies.

Clinical Encounters: The Social Justice Question in Intersectional Medicine

The American Journal of Bioethics, 2019

Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences: Case Studies of Policy Challenges from New Technologies

The Quarterly Review of Biology, 2008

The age of LARC: making sexual citizens on the frontiers of technoscientific healthism

Health Sociology Review, 2020

Routinely positioned as the ‘first-line option’ for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reve... more Routinely positioned as the ‘first-line option’ for contraceptive choice-making, long-acting reversible contraception (LARC) promotion efforts have come under critical scrutiny by reproductive justice advocates for the extent to which public health actors’ preference for LARC devices may override potential users’ ability to freely (not) choose to use contraception among an array of options. We identify LARC promotion discourse as constituting ‘The Age of LARC’: multifarious strategies for producing responsible sexual citizens whose health behaviours are empowered via a LARC-only approach to contraceptive use. We suggest that immediate postpartum LARC insertion policies, which have proliferated in the U.S. since 2012, exemplify the new era of LARC hegemony, in which urgency, efficiency, cost- effectiveness, and outcomes dominate both health policy and clinical practice around these contraceptive technologies. By following these efforts to facilitate access to and use of immediate postpartum LARC, we find a discourse on sexual citizenship that paradoxically constructs sexual health freedom through the use of a single class of contraceptive technologies.

My Bioethics Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be [Bleep]

by Jenny Brian, Patrick R Grzanka, and Janet Shim

Danis, Williams, and White (2016) argue that bioethicists have been glaringly absent from ongoing... more Danis, Williams, and White (2016) argue that bioethicists have been glaringly absent from ongoing social movements to combat racism, particularly the institutional and systematic oppression of African Americans in the United States. They assert that bioethics is uniquely positioned to promote antiracism in scholarship, training, and advocacy. In our title, we borrow from Flavia Dzoden’s (2011) (in)famous assertion about the importance of attending to “intersectionality” in the study and contestation of oppression. Intersectionality theory, rooted in Black feminist thought, has illuminated the weaknesses of social justice movements that conceptualize systems of inequality as discrete or parallel rather than intertwined. While we concur with Danis et al.’s assertions and share their commitment to an interdisciplinary bioethics that is rooted in social justice, we suggest that an intersectional approach would greatly enhance their prescription for bioethical antiracism. Innovative work in bioethics and related fields (e.g., medical sociology, science & technology studies) – including some of own scholarship – has demonstrated that race and racism are co-constituted by various intersecting forms of social inequality, including but not limited to sexism, capitalism, heterosexism, ableism, and globalization/neocolonialism. We outline the key analytic and political strengths of intersectionality theory and specify how Danis et al.’s recommendations may better attend to racism’s causes and material effects when infused with intersectional perspectives. We argue that intersectional antiracism should be at the center of bioethics – a more potent antiracism that attends to the empirical realities of racism’s collusion with intersecting systems of inequality.

Special perspectives section: responsible research and innovation for synthetic biology

I was the guest editor for a special section of the Journal of Responsible Innovation. Check out ... more

"Critiquing Culture from the Sidelines, a Conversation on Football, Cultural Critique, Ethics, and Collective Action." Culture in Conversation.

by Mary Ingram-Waters and Jenny Brian

Culture in Conversation, 2014

The Machine in the Garden of Desire

by Jenny Brian and Patrick R Grzanka

AJOB Neuroscience, Jan 2014

Bioethics and politics: Rules of engagement

The American Journal of Bioethics, Jan 29, 2009

Canada's stem cell corporation: Aggregate concerns and the question of public trust

Journal of Business Ethics, Jan 1, 2008

This paper examines one nascent entrepreneurial endeavour intended by Canada's Stem Cell Network ... more This paper examines one nascent entrepreneurial endeavour intended by Canada's Stem Cell Network to catalyze the commercialization of stem cell research: the creation of a company called ''Aggregate Therapeutics''. We argue that this initiative, in its current configuration, is likely to result in a breach of public trust owing to three inter-related concerns: conflicts of interest; corporate influence on the university research agenda; and the failure to provide some form of direct return for the public's substantial tax dollar investment. These concerns are common to many efforts to commercialize academic science but are rendered particularly acute in this case given the therapeutic promise of stem cell research and the considerable number of resources related to stem cell research in Canada, which Aggregate Therapeutics is expected to pool. We do, however, believe that the company can be altered to guard against a violation of the public's trust, and so we present concrete modifications to its structure, which we contend should be given immediate consideration.

The personal and interpersonal issues of egg donation

This article considers the implications of Canada's new legislation, Bill C-6: An act respecting ... more This article considers the implications of Canada's new legislation, Bill C-6: An act respecting assisted human reproduction and related research, for future oocyte donors and recipients. Specifically, this article explores the prohibition of payment to donors for oocyte donation, from the perspective of a paid oocyte donor.

Review: Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences: Case Studies of Policy Challenges from New Technologies

Quarterly Review of Biology, Dec 2008

Biotechnology, bioethics, and the future: a review of Ronald Bailey's Liberation biology

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, Jan 1, 2008