Call for Abstracts - Bodies, Health and Technology

SESSION 1: INTIMATE TECHNOLOGIES: EMBODYING ARTEFACTS, REMAKING BODIES, ENACTING NORMS

Lucie Dalibert, Marjolein de Boer, Gili Yaron, Department of Health, Ethics and Society, Faculty of Health, Medicine and Life Sciences, University of Maastricht, The Netherlands
Mary Fraser Berndtsson, Department of Sociology, Lund University, Sweden
Maria Dillschnitter, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, Germany

From prosthetics to implants to health monitoring technologies and Google Glass, technologies are increasingly getting closer to or even under our skin. While scholars in science and technology studies (STS) and philosophers of technology have paid attention to the relations between humans and technologies or between users and technological artefacts, scarce attention has been given to the interplay between bodies and technologies (Lettow 2011). Certainly, the cyborg (Haraway 1991) and the posthuman (Hayles 1999) have been delineated as figures that incarnate the contemporary intimacy of bodies and technologies and the porosity of their boundaries. In addition, the concept of biomedicalization (Clarke et al. 2010) serves to explore how standards of embodiment are transformed by the corporeal possibilities afforded by technoscientific objects, which results in the production of new individual and collective identities. However, how everyday bodies are transformed (or not) by technologies, how technologies actually become embodied (or not), and how the intimacy between bodies and technologies is done in practice, are issues that have been rarely explored (Sobchack 2006).                

Being fitted with (limb, breast, facial) prostheses or being implanted with pacemakers, hearing implants or neuromodulators does not take place in a vacuum. Rather, the experience of becoming a technologically transformed body and/or living with one is in fact situated in networks of relations and embedded in norms. This experience, that is, is influenced not only by how one’s own body feels and what it is in/capable of doing – it also involves (among others) the way loved ones approach one’s body, how medical professionals regard it, as well as norms governing what and who counts as human (e.g. ableist, gendered norms). Intimate technologies, their experience and their situated networks are what this session seeks to address and discuss. What matters when choosing (or refusing) to be fitted with a prothesis or to have an implant inserted in one’s body? What constitutes a good or bad prosthetic ‘fit’? How are one’s body and sense of embodiment re/configured with the implanted or prosthetic technology? How are bodily integrity and dis/ability trans/formed with prosthetic and implanted technologies? How are one’s values, norms and ‘humanness’ affected by (living with) prosthetic and implanted technologies and conversely? We welcome theoretical as well as empirical contributions engaging with (but not limited) to these issues.

REFERENCES:

Clarke, Adele E.; Shim, Janet K.; Mamo, Laura; Ruth Fosket, Jennifer and Jennifer R. Fishman. Eds. 2010. Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness in the U.S. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Haraway, Donna. 1991. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. London: Free Association Books
Hayles, N. Katherine. 1999. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press
Lettow, Susanne. 2011. ‘Somatechnologies: Rethinking the Body in Philosophy of Technology.’ Techné 15(2): 110-117
Sobchack, Vivian. 2006. ‘A Leg to Stand On: On Prosthetics, Metaphor, and Materiality.’ In Marquard Smith and Joanne Morra. Eds. The Prosthetic Impulse: From a Posthuman Present to a Biocultural Future. Cambridge and London: The MIT Press: 17-41

SESSION 2: mHEALTH AND SURVEILLANCE: CARING FOR DATA?

Maartje G.H. Niezen, Tjerk Timan, Tilburg, Institute for Law and Technology (TILT), University of Tilburg, The Netherlands

The increased use of mobile phones, devices and applications in the domain of health, healthcare and lifestyle (so-called m-health) have raised debates about surveillance and normalization. “The use of m-health technologies is constructed as both an object of surveillance and persuasion, and as a responsible citizen who is willing and able to act on the health imperatives issuing forth from the technologies and to present their body/self as open to continual measurement and assessment” (Lupton 2012). It is this tension between the (proposed) gain and improvement for the user via making, collecting and sharing data about his or her daily life versus the potential surveillance - and related to that, privacy- threats are at the heart of mHealth (Lupton 2012; Lupton 2013).

In addition, the agenda of mobile applications (apps hereafter), and mHealth in general, might vary, depending on the stakeholder perspective chosen. In fact, the relations between the stakeholders and the networks of care shape the various mHealth practices and users’ perceptions of themselves, their environment and mHealth technologies (Courtney, Demiris, and Hensel 2007). Where the idea of sharing data is becoming more and more normal in daily life (f.i. via social media), in relation to healthcare, this norm should be carefully investigated. Especially, the interface between professional healthcare and its increasing reliance on mobile applications, both within and outside clinical settings cause for attention to the user perspective, including questions of responsibility, participation and life(style) improvement.

mHealth thus entails both a convergence and conflict of two values: the culture of protecting data, specifically health related data, and the mobile culture of sharing data. To what extent should apps dealing with personal (semi) medical data be treated with more care? How is the balance of autonomy and surveillance negotiated through these apps? What kind of mechanisms and design choices are underlying these services? How can STS offer new perspective(s) of analysis? Studying mHealth practices provides insight in both the tension between surveillance and normalization, and the way this affects users’ perceptions of mHealth.

We encourage contributions that, either deal with mHealth and surveillance via case-studies and the use of specific methods (script analysis, discourse analyses, participatory observations, ethnographic studies of the user of these apps, platforms used, critical interface/ inter action studies, users studies) or via theoretical perspectives or frameworks (drawing from surveillance studies, legal frameworks, media studies).
 
 Courtney, Karen L, George Demiris, and Brian K Hensel. 2007. “Obtrusiveness of Information-Based Assistive Technologies as Perceived by Older Adults in Residential Care Facilities: A Secondary Analysis.” Informatics for Health and Social Care 32 (3): 241–49.
Lupton, Deborah. 2012. “M-Health and Health Promotion: The Digital Cyborg and Surveillance Society.” Social Theory & Health 10 (3): 229–44.
———. 2013. “The Digitally Engaged Patient: Self-Monitoring and Self-Care in the Digital Health Era.” Social Theory & Health 11 (3): 256–70.

see also:

Autonomy in Home Telecare Service
Making and Unmaking Telepatients. Identity and Governance in New Health Technologies
From health to health

SESSION 3: EMERGING CONFIGURATIONS OF BIOMEDICAL TECHNOLOGIES

Manuela Perrotta, Queen Mary, University of London, United Kingdom
Lilla Vicsek, Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

New developments in biomedicine have the potential to influence an increasing segment of the population, and challenge the relation between science and society in the so-called bioage. Biomedical technologies raise a great number of ethical, moral and social issues, the importance of which has been compared to those surrounding nuclear technology in the 20th century. Discussions and debates on these developments have come to take a prominent place in the public sphere, and have also resulted in changes in development options for these technologies and what kind of configurations of these technologies exist.

Despite global trends, it seems that ‘states still matter’ in the biomedical sphere, as different configurations of biomedical technologies emerge and stabilize in different national contexts. At the same time, social theorizing on biomedicine is often based on studies concentrating on a small number of countries, especially where there has been great debate surrounding biomedical technologies. We observe an increasing interest in the study of contexts where public debate on these technologies has been neglected, as bringing together these results from diverse societies can potentially contain interesting lessons for already existing theorizing.

Configurations of biomedical technologies can vary in different technopolitical cultures.  Different moral views in these fields shape the idea of  what is a proper treatment and how the biological materials involved should be handled, opening up or hindering potential pathways of biomedical practices and technology development in what has been termed the ‘moral landscape’. The fields of assisted reproductive technology and regenerative medicine are primary examples of sociomaterial practices emerging at the interface between the public, scientific, economic, ethical and regulatory dimensions in biomedicine.

This session seeks contributions that help the STS field to understand complex issues involved with local configurations of biomedical technologies and their ‘moral landscape’. We welcome contributions (empirically, theoretically, and/or methodologically oriented) that aim at analyzing the mutual shaping of state, market, institutions, local and professional values on the one hand and biomedical situated research and clinical practices on the other, and invite papers on how these everyday practices affect the emergence and stabilization of biomedical technologies.