Replaceable Parts: Prosthetic Technologies in Biomedicine

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Prosthetic technologies have long been a feature of embodied human life, as bodies inevitably break down; however, in the recent past contemporary biomedicine seems to be changing the scale and stakes of bodily enhancement. As scientists, physicians, and engineers come up with novel ways to offset the deficiencies of human bodies impaired by warfare, heredity, or accidental injury, they draw on and bring into being “prosthetic imaginaries.” These often-troublesome imaginaries emplace human bodies perceived to be deficient in local and global networks of capital, warfare, innovation, and care. This session, organized by the Science, Technology, and Medicine (STM) section of the Society for Medical Anthropology, explores the material practices, social contexts, and political formations in which prosthetic technologies are being developed and deployed as biomedical tools. Each of these ethnographic papers interrogates the multiple negotiations that physicians, patients, users, providers, and communities undertake as they come to terms with new technological developments and social formations in which prosthetics technologies are embedded. This nexus of STS scholarship intervenes on debates about the stakes of creating, regulating, and consuming high-tech, body-modifying, potentially life-changing prosthetic technologies.

Sub Unit

• 4S Annual Meeting – Denver

Chairs

• Danya Glabau, Cornell University

• Nayantara Sheoran, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies

Discussant

• Shobita Parthasarathy, University of Michigan

Individual Presentations

• You Move, It Moves: Prosthetic Technologies in Surgical Practice - Mark Olson, Duke University

• Prosthetics and the Technological Sublime - Seth Messinger, UMBC

• Getting Out of the Plaster Room - ginger "all-lower-case" coons, University of Toronto; Matthew Ratto, University of Toronto

• Prosthetic Infrastructures: 3D Printing and Face Transplantation - Samuel Taylor Alexander, University of Edinburgh

• New Legs and Old Skills - Ashley Shew, Virginia Tech