Between deception and dissent: regulating unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims

This Discovery Award will explore how unproven, disproven, or misleading health-related claims are regulated in contemporary states; examine the socio-political implications of current strategies; and imagine and propose alternative legal models. The Award will constitute a bold intervention into a complex social and legal issue, offering the first in-depth and cross-cutting interdisciplinary exploration of this highly pressing yet surprisingly under-explored matter. Our collective expertise in socio-legal studies, science and technology studies (STS), medical sociology and philosophy will be used to lead a theoretically-informed empirical investigation of regulatory approaches in three regional zones: Europe (France, Greece, Ireland, and the UK), West Africa (Ghana and Senegal), and North America (Mexico and Canada). We will bring together well-established qualitative methods, innovative cross-disciplinary strategies, and critical approaches to law and to the making of legitimate knowledge, in order to foster new scholarly and policy perspectives, and to push the boundaries of legal imagination. In addition to its key empirical and conceptual contributions, this Discovery Award will aim to build capacity for interdisciplinary research at the crossroad of law and the health social sciences and humanities, disrupting persistent barriers to the development of critical knowledge on law, health, and society.