Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
This panel, organized by the Science, Technology and Medicine special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology, builds on recent efforts in science studies and anthropology to open up the “black box” of valuation processes in technoscientific domains.
Life in the Anthropocene at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts starts Wednesday, March 8th at Verso Books (20 Jay St Brooklyn, NY 11201).
New medical technologies often challenge and remake frameworks for evaluating the ethics of biomedical procedures. This panel, organized by the Science, Technology, and Medicine section of the Society for Medical Anthropology, seeks to deepen the conversation about what happens when new medical tools come up against existing ethical sensibilities.
Disaster Capitalism at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts Thursday, February 2nd at The Workmen’s Circle (247 West 37th St 5th Floor, New York, NY 10018).
Happy New Year! Feminist Futures at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts January 30th at the New York Academy of Medicine (1216 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10029)!
I’m pleased to announce that my peer-reviewed scholarly article, titled “The Moral Life of Epinephrine in the United States,” has now been published on the open-access medical anthropology journal, Medicine Anthropology Theory!
Developed as a tool for colonial empire-building at the close of the 19th century, the ethnographic method has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as an important practice for telling the stories of the oppressed and demanding social change. How did this transformation take place, and what does it mean for the future of how human societies study and understand themselves?
Informed by Marxist theory, feminism, and science studies, this class interrogates how drugs – both engineered pharmaceuticals and pleasurably addictive illegal substances – gain and reproduce their power in our social life. As total health expenditures approach 20% of American GDP, and drugs become dynamic components of everyday life, understanding the personal experience and political economy of these compounds is more crucial than ever.
Join me in Jersey City for the Brooklyn Institute’s first Jersey class at Word Bookstore!
Donna Haraway argues in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex kinship with humans, non-humans, and machines, and an acceptance of the messiness that it takes to get along better together. Using this formulation of cyborg theory as a jumping off point, this seminar will explore what it means to live in our modern world where myths of human-machine synthesis prefigure our attitudes toward technology and the future, the responsibility of humans toward non-humans and the environment, capitalist accumulation, and oppression based on gender, race, and class.
Are you an graduate student writing about science, technology, and medicine in an anthropologically-informed way? If so, check out the … More
Over a career spanning four decades, philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and technoscience practitioners understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge, with special attention to the ways in which technoscience assigns biological meaning to social categories of gender. While Haraway is most famously associated with Cyborg Theory, this course will offer students an opportunity to survey the full scope of her oeuvre, including those works that draw on Marxist feminist theory, philosophy of science, and multispecies concerns.
What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What happens when infrastructure starts to break down, or prove inadequate in the face of disaster? What do infrastructures teach us? And what kind of world do they make possible? This four-week seminar pulls back the curtain to reveal the people, processes, and values that shape the infrastructures of modern life, and how these systems simultaneously provide opportunities for and place constraints on social life.
What happens when pharmaceuticals overflow the boundaries imposed by regulatory structures, carrier materials, and places and methods of production? What new risks–to bodies and environments–appear in an increasingly pharmaceuticalized world? What new social lives do drugs take on when used outside of their usage scripts, after expiration, or when they are cut, mixed, and remade into new types of drugs?
What happens in the lives of individuals and to their relationship to biomedical expertise when food is the best medicine?
Through our investigation of the multiple lives of immunity, this class will explore how the strategic deployment of scientific knowledge and medico-technological practices animates a biopolitical understanding of society and embeds modern biomedicine in every aspect of social life.
Since June, I’ve had a lot of projects on my plate – writing up my dissertation to meet firm deadlines for graduation this spring, joining the team of an allergy-focused biotechnology start-up company, joining the faculty of the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research (and now launching my second 4-week course in NYC, Imagining Immunity), conferencing, and starting the post-PhD adjustment.
Lovely readers, don’t miss my guest post, “What Can Food Allergy Experts (Including Parents) Teach the Rest of Us About … More
Danya Glabau 