Laura Starks
Biographic Data
| ID | 1619867 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Laura Starks |
| GIVEN NAMES | Laura |
| FAMILY NAME | Starks |
| SIGNATURE | STARKS L |
| AFFILIATIONS | Vanderbilt University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3342-1712 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 97 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
No Thanks
New Dissertations
Stave Churches in the History of Knowledge, Sine Halkjelsvik Bjordal Dis/ability in the Changing Welfare State, Christine Bylund On the Challenges of Decoloniality in the Swedish Museum of Ethnography, Charlotte Engman Listening to the Radio in Sweden, Elin Franzén Women in Icelandic Folk Legends, Dagrún Ósk Jónsdóttir Phenomenological Reflections on Seafarers’ Experiences from the Era of Steamships, Ulla Kallberg Pilgrimage in Norway, Hannah Kri…
Dangerous Medicine
Journal Article Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis. Sydney A. Halpern Get access Dangerous Medicine: The Story behind Human Experiments with Hepatitis Sydney A. HalpernNew Haven: Yale University Press, 2022. 304 pp. Laura Stark Laura Stark Vanderbilt University, Tennessee, USA [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Journal of the History of Medi…
Mutual Aid
Since around 2010, a workers' history of science has emerged as a distinct set of research questions and professional practices. More than a consolidation of prior concepts, the workers' history of science attends to resource distribution both in sites of science in the past and in present-day historians' sites of training and labor—the university, the library, the research organization, the professional meeting, and more. To understand the timin…
Reservations
The lab/field binary obscures a coherent structure that grounds both types of sites: settler colonialism. In the United States, settler colonialism has depended on property relations based on dispossession and white supremacist logics that have supported and been supported by sciences in a range of sites. The case of the National Institutes of Health on the reservation(s) registers the experiences of a college student who was alternately a “human…
What Is Compliance? How Audits Change Ethics and Organizational Fields
A Warm Welcome from the New Editorial Team
Molecular Genetics, Risk Aversion, Return Perceptions, and Stock Market Participation
We show that molecular variation in DNA related to cognition, personality, health, and body shape, predicts an individual's equity market participation and risk aversion.Moreover, the molecular genetic endowments predict individuals' return perceptions, most of which we find to be strikingly biased.The genetic endowments also strongly associate with many of the investor characteristics (e.g., trust, sociability, wealth) shown to explain heterogen…
Motives and Agency in Forced Marriage among the Urban Poor in Tanzania
Using the method of third-person elicitation and 171 interviews in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, I examine one form of forced marriage, 'marriage on the mat' (ndoa ya mkeka). In it, girls' parents use the normative pressure of Islamic norms to circumvent the groom's lack of consent to the marriage and promote their daughter's future economic security. Premarital sex and forced marriage, rarely examined together, are often causally linked and provide s…
Why daughters may choose early marriage
Emergence
Histories of science in the past decade have increasingly used the language of "emergence" to explain the effects of which their histories give account. More than a linguistic fad, this word registers an intentional, persuasive, and important theoretical position and ethical stance that is located in critical relation to causal accounts of history. Attending to the death of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) helps make apparent the key criticisms of causal…
Early marriage and cultural constructions of adulthood in two slums in Dar es Salaam
This study examines under-18 marriage in urban Tanzania from an ethnographic perspective. Due to poverty and high unemployment, some girls aspire to early marriage. Two pathways to early marriage are identified: first, poverty and gendered economic disparities motivate girls to begin transactional sexual activity at an early age, leading parents to favour early marriage as a risk-reduction measure. Second, educational opportunities are often clos…
Contracting Health
The American medical research industry seemed poised to collapse in the wake of the US civil rights movement because of sudden, sharp restrictions on access to human subjects for medical research. Yet research on healthy people continued to expand, eventually taking a new organizational form with the rise of Contract Research Organizations. This surprising outcome emerged because a set of private religious organizations during the 1950s aligned w…
The ineffable
Conventionally, the story of modern research methods has been told as the gradual ascendancy of practices that scientists designed to extract evidence out of minds and bodies. These methods, which we call ‘methods of extraction’, have not been the exclusive ways in which experts have generated evidence. In a variety of case studies, scholars in Science and Technology Studies have persuasively documented scientists’ efforts to know the extra-lingu…
Poverty, Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage
The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment as dependent on the ability to make choices, not only between actual alternatives but also between perceived alternatives. In contexts of severe poverty, more attention is needed to the lack of viable alternatives open to families, and their motives in …
Making a Mark
Walter Benjamin believed it was possible "to read what was never written." His own writing and practices sought both to explain and model how a person might undertake this historical project. Benjamin's essay "On the Mimetic Faculty" provides a through line for the papers collected in this theme issue, which is designed to prompt further work and inquiry into how words-and historical materials broadly construed-might be read not only for their co…
What Is a Human? What the Answers Mean for Human Rights
Work, welfare, and the values of voluntarism
FHHS News-Jan 2017
Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania
This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of 'affect', I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of 'true love' and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view t…
Emotional causality in dynamistic Finnish–Karelian folk belief
Drawing on more than 1,700 folk narratives and descriptions of folk belief, this article posits a particular ethnotheory of emotion centred on anger and fear in the 19th- and early 20th-century Finnish countryside. According to this ethnotheory, it was believed that anger could kill or injure others at a distance, and that the envy and desires of others were sufficient in and of themselves to cause harm to neighbours. Moreover, not only humans we…
Out of Their Depths
Michel Foucault's The Order of Things is uniquely relevant to historians because it is about the contradictions of writing history in the present day, and because it makes claims absent from other books often seen as similar, such as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Order, the present-day modern episteme is characterized by unconscious elements that connect Man through time. These unconscious elements are only vaguely di…
Muslim Intimacies Challenges for Individuals and Families in Global Contexts
nonPeerReviewed
Transactional Sex, Early Marriage, and Parent- Child Relations in a Tanzanian Slum
Transactional sex has been recognized as a major factor in the persistence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet it also has implications for the persistence of poverty. Using interview data collected between 2010 and 2015, this article examines how Muslim families in Dar es Salaam are affected by transactional sexual behavior. 1 Examined are motives for transactional sex, how poor families view the purpose of marriage, and religious teachings a…
Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor
Journal Article Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics Get access Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics, Beacon Press: Boston, 2014. Pp. ix + 223. $25.95. 978 0 8070 3340 1. Laura Stark Laura Stark Vanderbilt University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medici…
Victims in Our Own Minds? IRBs in Myth and Practice
Are Poor Neighborhoods Resource Deprived? A Case Study of Childcare Centers in New York
Objective. Many social scientists believe poor mothers are better off in middle‐class than in poor neighborhoods, partly because the latter are deprived of important institutional resources. We test whether poor neighborhoods are more likely to lack one critical institutional resource, the childcare center. Methods. We use geocoded data on all licensed centers in the City of New York, address matched to Census tracts. We estimate logit models of …
The debate over low fertility in the popular press
Poverty, Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage
The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment as dependent on the ability to make choices, not only between actual alternatives but also between perceived alternatives. In contexts of severe poverty, more attention is needed to the lack of viable alternatives open to families, and their motives in …
The science of ethics
This paper has two aims. The first is to shed light on a remarkable archival source, namely survey responses from thousands of American psychologists during the 1960s in which they described their contemporary research practices and discussed whether the practices were "ethical." The second aim is to examine the process through which the American Psychological Association (APA) used these survey responses to create principles on how psychologists…
Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania
This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of 'affect', I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of 'true love' and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view t…
Making up ‘Vulnerable’ People
Journal Article Making up 'Vulnerable' People: Human Subjects and the Subjective Experience of Medical Experiment Get access Nancy D. Campbell, Nancy D. Campbell * *Corresponding author: Nancy D. Campbell, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Laura Stark Laura Stark Search for other work…
Stowaways in the history of science
The Popular Debate about Low Fertility
Emergence
Histories of science in the past decade have increasingly used the language of "emergence" to explain the effects of which their histories give account. More than a linguistic fad, this word registers an intentional, persuasive, and important theoretical position and ethical stance that is located in critical relation to causal accounts of history. Attending to the death of Frantz Fanon (1925–1961) helps make apparent the key criticisms of causal…
Reservations
The lab/field binary obscures a coherent structure that grounds both types of sites: settler colonialism. In the United States, settler colonialism has depended on property relations based on dispossession and white supremacist logics that have supported and been supported by sciences in a range of sites. The case of the National Institutes of Health on the reservation(s) registers the experiences of a college student who was alternately a “human…
Contracting Health
The American medical research industry seemed poised to collapse in the wake of the US civil rights movement because of sudden, sharp restrictions on access to human subjects for medical research. Yet research on healthy people continued to expand, eventually taking a new organizational form with the rise of Contract Research Organizations. This surprising outcome emerged because a set of private religious organizations during the 1950s aligned w…
The ineffable
Conventionally, the story of modern research methods has been told as the gradual ascendancy of practices that scientists designed to extract evidence out of minds and bodies. These methods, which we call ‘methods of extraction’, have not been the exclusive ways in which experts have generated evidence. In a variety of case studies, scholars in Science and Technology Studies have persuasively documented scientists’ efforts to know the extra-lingu…
Representation of the written and oral in Finnish Kalevala meter poetry
Karelian Monasteries and Pilgrimage in Oral and Written Narrative. Institutional and 'Folk' Representations of the Sacred
No abstract available
Sacred agents and 'mirror' communities
No abstract available
The debate over low fertility in the popular press
Peasants, Pilgrims and Sacred Promises
The Popular Debate about Low Fertility
Are Poor Neighborhoods Resource Deprived? A Case Study of Childcare Centers in New York
Objective. Many social scientists believe poor mothers are better off in middle‐class than in poor neighborhoods, partly because the latter are deprived of important institutional resources. We test whether poor neighborhoods are more likely to lack one critical institutional resource, the childcare center. Methods. We use geocoded data on all licensed centers in the City of New York, address matched to Census tracts. We estimate logit models of …
Victims in Our Own Minds? IRBs in Myth and Practice
The science of ethics
This paper has two aims. The first is to shed light on a remarkable archival source, namely survey responses from thousands of American psychologists during the 1960s in which they described their contemporary research practices and discussed whether the practices were "ethical." The second aim is to examine the process through which the American Psychological Association (APA) used these survey responses to create principles on how psychologists…
The Materiality of the Imagined Family
nonPeerReviewed
Stowaways in the history of science
Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor
Journal Article Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics Get access Barron H. Lerner, The Good Doctor: A Father, A Son, and the Evolution of Medical Ethics, Beacon Press: Boston, 2014. Pp. ix + 223. $25.95. 978 0 8070 3340 1. Laura Stark Laura Stark Vanderbilt University [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Social History of Medici…
Making up ‘Vulnerable’ People
Journal Article Making up 'Vulnerable' People: Human Subjects and the Subjective Experience of Medical Experiment Get access Nancy D. Campbell, Nancy D. Campbell * *Corresponding author: Nancy D. Campbell, Department of Science and Technology Studies, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY. USA. Email: [email protected] Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic PubMed Google Scholar Laura Stark Laura Stark Search for other work…
Voicelessness and the Limits of Agency in Early Modern Finnish Narratives on Magic and the Supernatural
Given that narrative research has shown narration to be an innate trait of the human species, the concept of narrative culture encompasses a vast domain. Here I define it as a system of conventions1 for representing temporally ordered events, conventions that are shared by a group. Such groups tend to be coterminous with linguistic communities. This definition implies that the conventions of a given narrative culture that are intelligible to one …
Emotional causality in dynamistic Finnish–Karelian folk belief
Drawing on more than 1,700 folk narratives and descriptions of folk belief, this article posits a particular ethnotheory of emotion centred on anger and fear in the 19th- and early 20th-century Finnish countryside. According to this ethnotheory, it was believed that anger could kill or injure others at a distance, and that the envy and desires of others were sufficient in and of themselves to cause harm to neighbours. Moreover, not only humans we…
Out of Their Depths
Michel Foucault's The Order of Things is uniquely relevant to historians because it is about the contradictions of writing history in the present day, and because it makes claims absent from other books often seen as similar, such as Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. For Order, the present-day modern episteme is characterized by unconscious elements that connect Man through time. These unconscious elements are only vaguely di…
Muslim Intimacies Challenges for Individuals and Families in Global Contexts
nonPeerReviewed
Transactional Sex, Early Marriage, and Parent- Child Relations in a Tanzanian Slum
Transactional sex has been recognized as a major factor in the persistence of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa, yet it also has implications for the persistence of poverty. Using interview data collected between 2010 and 2015, this article examines how Muslim families in Dar es Salaam are affected by transactional sexual behavior. 1 Examined are motives for transactional sex, how poor families view the purpose of marriage, and religious teachings a…
Work, welfare, and the values of voluntarism
FHHS News-Jan 2017
Cultural Politics of Love and Provision among Poor Youth in Urban Tanzania
This article examines how urban youth in the poorest neighbourhoods of Dar es Salaam negotiate the terms of transactional intimacy, that is, heterosexual relations in which men are expected to provide for women materially. Using the concept of 'affect', I argue that this negotiation involves different levels of male providership, as well as moral values attached to notions of 'true love' and the Swahili concept of tamaa. Poor men and women view t…
Early marriage and cultural constructions of adulthood in two slums in Dar es Salaam
This study examines under-18 marriage in urban Tanzania from an ethnographic perspective. Due to poverty and high unemployment, some girls aspire to early marriage. Two pathways to early marriage are identified: first, poverty and gendered economic disparities motivate girls to begin transactional sexual activity at an early age, leading parents to favour early marriage as a risk-reduction measure. Second, educational opportunities are often clos…
Contracting Health
The American medical research industry seemed poised to collapse in the wake of the US civil rights movement because of sudden, sharp restrictions on access to human subjects for medical research. Yet research on healthy people continued to expand, eventually taking a new organizational form with the rise of Contract Research Organizations. This surprising outcome emerged because a set of private religious organizations during the 1950s aligned w…
The ineffable
Conventionally, the story of modern research methods has been told as the gradual ascendancy of practices that scientists designed to extract evidence out of minds and bodies. These methods, which we call ‘methods of extraction’, have not been the exclusive ways in which experts have generated evidence. In a variety of case studies, scholars in Science and Technology Studies have persuasively documented scientists’ efforts to know the extra-lingu…
Poverty, Consent, and Choice in Early Marriage
The assumed inability of adolescents to voluntarily consent to marriage is a key definition of child marriage. Using ethnography, this study approaches consent, self-determination, and fulfillment as dependent on the ability to make choices, not only between actual alternatives but also between perceived alternatives. In contexts of severe poverty, more attention is needed to the lack of viable alternatives open to families, and their motives in …
Sociology (26 works) · Political science (18 works) · Psychology (15 works) · Law (13 works) · Law (11 works) · Philosophy (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Epistemology (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Economics (8 works)