Emergent Technologies in Biomedicine and Healthcare: Boundaries, Tensions, and Possibilities - III

Abstract

Emergent technologies and the implementation of new and innovative models, measures, and systems present rich sites for STS scholars to follow, understand, and intervene on technologies in the making (Brey 2012; Guston 2014). As new technologies are implemented in existing biomedical research and healthcare infrastructures, they carry with them great promise to disrupt standards and routine practice as well as improve our understanding of health, illness, and the human body. Yet as STS scholars have shown, technologies often reproduce and deepen existing disparities (Eubanks 2018; Lee 2003; Murphy 2006; Noble 2018; Sankar et al. 2004; Shostak 2013). Studying how emergent technologies and systems are designed, regenerated, mechanized, commercialized, and integrated offers a window to understand the trajectory of technologies and the racialized, classed, and gendered logic of systems with which they interact. This panel invites empirical contributions that explore how emergent technologies and platforms are constructed, implemented, and standardized in biomedical and healthcare settings. In alignment with this year's theme, papers should offer innovative approaches and generate new ways of reframing the promises of innovation. We particularly are interested in papers that examine the implications of emergent technologies and systems for inequality and health justice.

Chair

• Rosalie Winslow, University of California, San Francisco

Individual Presentations

• Is This Treatment Worth Paying For? Contradictory Discourses on the Use of Time-Lapse Imaging in IVF Labs - Alina Geampana, Queen Mary University of London; Manuela Perrotta, Queen Mary, University of London

• Necessary Medicine: Reframing the Insurance Argument for Transition-Related Care - Elizabeth Dietz, Arizona State University

• Technologies of the Body Multiple: CAH, Intersex and Care for Patients in India - Mathangi Krishnamurthy, Indian Institute of Technology Madras

• Why Not Follow Guidelines? Challenge of HPV Testing to Cervical Cancer Screening Program in Taiwan - Yeh-Han Wang, Division of Policy and Law, Institute of Public Health, National Yang-Ming University, Taipei Taiwan

• Women’s Health, Destigmatization, and Sustainability: The Co-Construction of Reusable Menstrual Technologies in the Context of Menstrual Activism in Argentina - Jacqueline Gaybor, Erasmus University Rotterdam

Session Organizer

• Melanie Jeske, University of California, San Francisco