Core Publications
Schnieder, L. (2020). Trajektorien der Sorge. Zur Konstitution von Versuchspersonen am Beispiel der Psoriasis-Forschung. Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft.

Schnieder, L. (2015). Motive und Entscheidungswege bei Nichttester_innen. Diskussion eines Fallbeispiels. In Lemke, T., & Liebsch, K. (eds.), Die Regierung der Gene. Diskriminierung und Verantwortung im Kontext genetischen Wissens. Frankfurt am Main: VS, 155–168.

Most recent

Lemke, T., Rüppel, J., & Schnieder, L. (2018). Die Personalisierung der Depression. Entwicklungslinien der psychiatrischen Biomarker-Forschung. Bioskop, 21 (83), 14f.

Independent Research Group “Human Diversity in the New Life Sciences: Social and Scientific Effects of Biological Differentiations” (SoSciBio) at the University of Freiburg  (3/2018-2/2024, Federal Ministry of Education and Research, funding number 01GP1710)

When experimental subjects meet. Decision-making processes of psoriasis patients regarding participation in medical research in Germany (04.2014-05.2019, PhD-Project, Funding institution: German Research Foundation (04.2014-12.2016))

Clinical research involving drugs is dependent on experimental subjects, i.e. persons who are willing to face the double liminal experience between being merely a “technical object” and personal integrity, between experimental medicine and bodily intactness. The PhD project focuses on the complex figure of ‘the’ experimental subject from a decidedly sociological perspective as a complement to a hegemonic bioethical framing. Empirically and analytically, I zoom in on the decision-making processes leading up to participation as well as on ‘the’ experimental subject’s entanglements in the everyday (care) labour at a dermatological research centre in Germany.
 
Personalized Depression? Investigating the Preconditions, Dynamics and Implications of Psychiatric Biomarker Research (Prof. Dr. Thomas Lemke, Research Associates: Jonas Rüppel and Laura Schnieder, January 2017 to December 2019, German Research Foundation)

Psychiatric research and clinical practice are currently undergoing a transformation many observers regard as a real paradigm shift. While psychiatric interventions have so far been based on the experiences, narratives and behavior of patients, they are increasingly relying on biological parameters, so-called biomarkers. According to the vision of a “personalized psychiatry”, biomarkers provide for a better diagnosis, prognosis and therapy of psychiatric diseases as they indicate disease severity or susceptibility to treatment, thereby making it possible to “tailor” interventions to the specific bodily features and biological characteristics of individuals. Today, a few biomarker-tests are already available while others will enter clinical practice in the foreseeable future.

The proposed research project is the first to sociologically investigate this essential transformation. It starts from the thesis that the new focus on biomarkers not only changes professional practices and the disciplinary boundaries of psychiatry, but will also modify institutional structures and practices and result in new concepts of mental illness and health, psychic and corporal processes. Informed by the research design of situational analysis, the project examines the conditions, dynamics and implications of psychiatric biomarker research using the example of depression. For this purpose, document and media analysis, expert interviews and ethnographies of psychiatric conferences will provide insights into both the practical contexts and the technical preconditions of biomarker research and the expectations, hopes and fears within the psychiatric arena that go along with the introduction and proliferation of biomarkers for depression. The project contributes to the sociology of psychiatric knowledge by combining an analytics of government following the work of Michel Foucault with insights from Science and Technology Studies. It investigates the historical ontology of depression as a fluid and contested medical classification and seeks to conceptually sharpen the notion of biomarkerization. Beyond the scientific objectives, the research project also provides empirical insights and theoretical reflections highly relevant for the public debate on the societal implications of the vision of a personalized psychiatry.