Matthew Wolf‐meyer
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 94210 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Matthew Wolf‐meyer |
| NOMBRES | Matthew |
| APELLIDO | Wolf‐meyer |
| FIRMA | MEYER M W |
| AFILIACIONES | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7249-9726 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 34 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 118 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 34 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
Institutional Determinants of Health
Institution-level interventions can lead to positive health outcomes for individuals and communities. Focusing attention on how the organization of specific institutions leads to negative health outcomes can provide the basis for systemic reform that addresses structural, social, and environmental determinants of health in immediate and practical ways. Enacting policy and practical reforms in institutions requires identifying and overcoming mythi…
Subjunctive Grief
Grief is typically portrayed as an individual experience that is a response to loss and provides the basis for personal growth; grief is something to work through, and, ideally, to benefit from, and represents a state change. But might it be possible to conceptualize grief of the future, a subjunctive grief that is based in speculation about change that brings that change into the present? The subjunctive invokes the wished for, the imagined, and…
Negative Evidence
This literary essay examines and rehearses the conceptual challenge fatigue poses to diagnosis in its clinical and critical registers. Taking as its case study Joan Copjec’s essay "Battle Fatigue: Kiarostami and Capitalism"—wherein fatigue, conceptually declined from Levinas' weariness of existence and the psychoanalytic death drive, is deployed as a theoretical lens through which to read Abbas Kiarostami's film Taste of Cherry—this essay argues …
Idiosyncratic and Non-Unitary
In this article, I argue for an antinormative bioethics based in disability experiences drawn from memoirists’ accounts of idiosyncratic needs and desires that are obscured by normative impulses in mainstream bioethics. Bioethics has long been shaped by a commitment to the normal, which often casts disabled people and the category of disability as anterior to bioethical concerns about individual rights, protections, and property. Focusing on disa…
Four Qualities of Care
In this essay I focus on two documentaries about disability—Frederick Wiseman’s “Titicut Follies” (1967) and Nicole Newnham and James Lebrecht’s “Crip Camp” (2020)—to explore how institutional approaches to care support disabled people and their articulation of personhood. Rather than abstract discussions of care, attending to care qualitatively reveals the fundamental differences between institutions and institutional effects on disabled people.…
Making Up Persons
Personhood is alternatively accepted as something that is innate in individuals or subject to processes of attribution that rely on the existence of specific capacities. Taking Ian Hacking's discussion of "dynamic nominalism" as a point of departure, I focus on how the categorization of difference makes "people" into a "person" or not, in relation to the legitimacy of their needs and desires. To explicate, I turn to Lorna Rhodes' Total Confinemen…
The Cambridge Companion to American Utopian Literature and Culture since 1945
Providing a comprehensive overview of American thought in the period following World War II, after which the US became a global military and economic leader, this book explores the origins of American utopianism and provides a trenchant critique from the point of view of those left out of the hegemonic ideal. Centring the voices of those oppressed by or omitted from the consumerist American Dream, this book celebrates alternative ways of thinking…
Becoming malleable
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including "the field" and "the anthropology seminar." Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleab…
Is a Psychotic Anthropology Possible? Or How to Have Inclusive Anthropologies of Subjectivity and Personhood
Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as "normal," which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropolo…
Human-centred design, disability and bioethics
Human-centred design methodologies provide a means to align bioethical advocacy with the needs and desires of disabled people. As a method, human-centred design seeks to locate points of friction in an individual's experience of everyday interactions, specifically in relation to technologies, but potentially in relation to processes and institutions. By focusing on disabled persons and their experiences of institutional organisation, human-centre…
Recomposing kinship
What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In exploring this position, I draw on accounts of disability and illness. First, I focus on an account of fecal microbial transplant use and the intimate connections the technology creates between the recipient and donor. This is followed with the case of a woman who relies upon facilitated communication to communicate with her social others, which depends o…
Facilitated personhood
Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational ties to others, including humans and nonhumans. American ideas about the individual are deeply ideological, obscuring the human relations that make 'personhood' a possible, desirable concept that motivates subjection. Attending to neurological disorders and the technologies that attempt to remedy communication impairments shows that not only is the lab…
Theory for the World to Come
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused A…
Neurological disorders, affective bioethics, and the nervous system
This article proposes a novel approach to bioethics, referred to as "affective bioethics", which draws on traditions in anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, and Spinozist materialism. By focusing on the case of Michael and Terri Schiavo, in which Terri's personhood and subjectivity are challenged by dominant forms of neurological reductivism in the USA, this article suggests that approaching her condition as a set of …
"Human Nature" and the Biology of Everyday Life
Anthropologists are well poised to contribute to an immanent theory of human physiological experiences that accounts for the broad social and environmental influences that shape individual and community experiences of health and disease. This article forwards a theory of "the biology of everyday life" as a means to conceptualize the interactions between institutional expectations of behavior, cultural norms, and biological plasticity. Drawing on …
American Normal
Key social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of "ide…
Normal, Regular, and Standard
In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a workshop to determine the risks and benefits associated with the experimental use of fecal microbial transplants to treat Clostridium difficile and other gastroenterological disorders. By focusing on the proceedings of the NIH-FDA workshop on the treatment of the human microbiome, the question of how medicine colonizes human bodies through microbial…
Chronic Subjunctivity, or, How Physicians Use Diabetes and Insomnia to Manage Futures in the United States
Prognostication has become central to medical practice, offering clinicians and patients views of particular futures enabled by biomedical expertise and technologies. Drawing on research on diabetes care and sleep medicine in the United States, in this article we suggest that subjectivity is increasingly modeled on medical understandings of chronic illness. These chronic conceptions of the self and society instill in individuals an anxiety about …
Our Master's Voice, the Practice of Melancholy, and Minor Sciences
How do scientists and experts in marginal scientific fields think about themselves, their knowledge production, and their practices in relation to dominant sciences? In this article, drawing on fieldwork with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, I argue that what motivates much of the training, practice, and thought of some contemporary psychoanalysts is their place as practicing a minor science in relation to dominant forms of psychiatry and neur…
Unifying minor sciences and minor literatures
In this paper, we explore the possibility of using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of minor science and literature to examine the role of marginalized sciences, particularly in the United States. We suggest that by combining Deleuze and Guattari's work on minor sciences and minor literatures that the framework for an anthropology of science which takes alternative and marginalized sciences seriously can be established. To elucidate t…
Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States
The racialization of individuals in the contemporary United States is increasingly accomplished through institutional actors, including scientists and physicians. As genetic health risks, chronic disease treatments, and pharmaceuticals come to define Americans' understanding of themselves, a fundamental shift is occurring in the way medicine is practiced and its role in the production of subjectivity. Underlying these changes is an expectation of…
Disclosure as method, disclosure as dilemma
Jack had first experienced symptoms related to narcolepsy in his late thirties. Ryan had been diagnosed with almost all the conditions that a disordered sleeper could be diagnosed with narcolepsy. For both Jack and Ryan, the consequences of their disclosures endanger their status as employees and, by extension, their ability to meet their family obligations and other social commitments. Although ethnographers are exposed to the vulnerabilities of…
Myths of Modern American Sleep
Across different kinds of modern influences on human sleep—from communication and media technologies, to medical interventions and chemicals used to modify sleep and wakefulness, to the organization of social life—some are seen as interfering with human nature. Others, like many institutions, are accepted as natural. This is apparent in the example of school start times, which are widely assumed to be based on an agrarian past. Unlike modern medi…
Therapy, Remedy, Cure
Increasingly, there is a temporal differentiation among kinds of treatments available through medicine. Cures offer one-time resolution of symptoms; that is, with the benefit of a cure, there is no longer a medical problem in need of treatment. Remedies offer temporary, situational relief of symptoms. Therapies offer temporary relief of symptoms, but promise the possibility of nonsituational fixes, offering universal cessation of symptoms but onl…
Where Have All Our Naps Gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the Consolidation of Sleep, and the Historiography of Emergence
In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present;…
Therapy, Remedy, Cure
Increasingly, there is a temporal differentiation among kinds of treatments available through medicine. Cures offer one-time resolution of symptoms; that is, with the benefit of a cure, there is no longer a medical problem in need of treatment. Remedies offer temporary, situational relief of symptoms. Therapies offer temporary relief of symptoms, but promise the possibility of nonsituational fixes, offering universal cessation of symptoms but onl…
The World Ozymandias Made
Revolution is the triumph of freedom; its organization is based on spontaneity, not on the dictates of a “hero” who imposes himself through violence. It is a continuous and systematic elevation of a people, following the lines of a hierarchy, and creating for itself one by one the organs that the new social life demands
Normal, Regular, and Standard
In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a workshop to determine the risks and benefits associated with the experimental use of fecal microbial transplants to treat Clostridium difficile and other gastroenterological disorders. By focusing on the proceedings of the NIH-FDA workshop on the treatment of the human microbiome, the question of how medicine colonizes human bodies through microbial…
Sleep, Signification and the Abstract Body of Allopathic Medicine
This article focuses on the recent production of sleep as a matter of concern in American society. In it, I draw primarily on fieldwork with sleep researchers and clinicians to understand the means by which ideas about sleep are produced and disseminated, and discuss the rise of sleep medicine since the late 1970s and the ways sleep disabilities have been constructed and mobilized in contemporary allopathic research and practice. The article prov…
Natural Hegemonies
American capitalism finds its force and legitimacy in hegemonic understandings of nature and society, especially as expressed in human biology. In this article, I address the ways American capitalism depends on the deployment of sleep and wakefulness within the institutional contexts of school and labor, with particular attention to the recent medicalization of sleep disorders. Across American institutions and social science literature, I argue t…
Facilitated personhood
Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational ties to others, including humans and nonhumans. American ideas about the individual are deeply ideological, obscuring the human relations that make 'personhood' a possible, desirable concept that motivates subjection. Attending to neurological disorders and the technologies that attempt to remedy communication impairments shows that not only is the lab…
Precipitating Pharmakologies and Capital Entrapments
Since the mid-1990s, Americans have been made more aware of chronic sleep deprivation and sleep disorders exacerbated by dominant temporal regimes of work, school, and family life, primarily through increased medical and media attention. Concomitantly, Americans have turned to medical treatments and pharmaceutical cocktails to achieve normalcy rather than attending to the social and cultural causes of sleep sickness. This turn toward pharmaceutic…
Chronic Subjunctivity, or, How Physicians Use Diabetes and Insomnia to Manage Futures in the United States
Prognostication has become central to medical practice, offering clinicians and patients views of particular futures enabled by biomedical expertise and technologies. Drawing on research on diabetes care and sleep medicine in the United States, in this article we suggest that subjectivity is increasingly modeled on medical understandings of chronic illness. These chronic conceptions of the self and society instill in individuals an anxiety about …
Where Have All Our Naps Gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the Consolidation of Sleep, and the Historiography of Emergence
In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present;…
The Nature of Sleep
In April of 2004, only a few months into my fieldwork, I was struck by the level and variety of doubt expressed by the physicians at the Midwest Sleep Disorder Center (MSDC). The MSDC is a group of physicians recognized in the field as experts in many areas of sleep medicine, especially parasomnias-such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating, and REM behavior disorder. Dr. Richards, the clinic's senior researcher and a neurologist by training, beg…
Is a Psychotic Anthropology Possible? Or How to Have Inclusive Anthropologies of Subjectivity and Personhood
Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as "normal," which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropolo…
"Human Nature" and the Biology of Everyday Life
Anthropologists are well poised to contribute to an immanent theory of human physiological experiences that accounts for the broad social and environmental influences that shape individual and community experiences of health and disease. This article forwards a theory of "the biology of everyday life" as a means to conceptualize the interactions between institutional expectations of behavior, cultural norms, and biological plasticity. Drawing on …
Our Master's Voice, the Practice of Melancholy, and Minor Sciences
How do scientists and experts in marginal scientific fields think about themselves, their knowledge production, and their practices in relation to dominant sciences? In this article, drawing on fieldwork with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, I argue that what motivates much of the training, practice, and thought of some contemporary psychoanalysts is their place as practicing a minor science in relation to dominant forms of psychiatry and neur…
Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States
The racialization of individuals in the contemporary United States is increasingly accomplished through institutional actors, including scientists and physicians. As genetic health risks, chronic disease treatments, and pharmaceuticals come to define Americans' understanding of themselves, a fundamental shift is occurring in the way medicine is practiced and its role in the production of subjectivity. Underlying these changes is an expectation of…
Becoming malleable
Drawing on anthropological scholarship on the senses, embodiment, and communication, we argue for a capacity-based anthropology that takes account of human variation in all domains of everyday life, including "the field" and "the anthropology seminar." Such an approach allows us to consider the ways that humans are differently malleable, and we stress that enacting malleability, when possible, is a kind of ethical engagement. Attending to malleab…
Unifying minor sciences and minor literatures
In this paper, we explore the possibility of using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of minor science and literature to examine the role of marginalized sciences, particularly in the United States. We suggest that by combining Deleuze and Guattari's work on minor sciences and minor literatures that the framework for an anthropology of science which takes alternative and marginalized sciences seriously can be established. To elucidate t…
Making Up Persons
Personhood is alternatively accepted as something that is innate in individuals or subject to processes of attribution that rely on the existence of specific capacities. Taking Ian Hacking's discussion of "dynamic nominalism" as a point of departure, I focus on how the categorization of difference makes "people" into a "person" or not, in relation to the legitimacy of their needs and desires. To explicate, I turn to Lorna Rhodes' Total Confinemen…
Neurological disorders, affective bioethics, and the nervous system
This article proposes a novel approach to bioethics, referred to as "affective bioethics", which draws on traditions in anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, and Spinozist materialism. By focusing on the case of Michael and Terri Schiavo, in which Terri's personhood and subjectivity are challenged by dominant forms of neurological reductivism in the USA, this article suggests that approaching her condition as a set of …
American Normal
Key social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of "ide…
Myths of Modern American Sleep
Across different kinds of modern influences on human sleep—from communication and media technologies, to medical interventions and chemicals used to modify sleep and wakefulness, to the organization of social life—some are seen as interfering with human nature. Others, like many institutions, are accepted as natural. This is apparent in the example of school start times, which are widely assumed to be based on an agrarian past. Unlike modern medi…
Extremities
Emergent conditions of life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century create new opportunities and challenges for medical anthropology. The articles included in this special issue of Medical Anthropology suggest four areas that call out for more attention: the changing scientific and philosophical status of the human, including definitions of life and biology more broadly; the material consequences of anticipatory fictions; the e…
Transgressing the Frontier
The World Ozymandias Made
Revolution is the triumph of freedom; its organization is based on spontaneity, not on the dictates of a “hero” who imposes himself through violence. It is a continuous and systematic elevation of a people, following the lines of a hierarchy, and creating for itself one by one the organs that the new social life demands
Sleep, Signification and the Abstract Body of Allopathic Medicine
This article focuses on the recent production of sleep as a matter of concern in American society. In it, I draw primarily on fieldwork with sleep researchers and clinicians to understand the means by which ideas about sleep are produced and disseminated, and discuss the rise of sleep medicine since the late 1970s and the ways sleep disabilities have been constructed and mobilized in contemporary allopathic research and practice. The article prov…
Fantasies of Extremes
Precipitating Pharmakologies and Capital Entrapments
Since the mid-1990s, Americans have been made more aware of chronic sleep deprivation and sleep disorders exacerbated by dominant temporal regimes of work, school, and family life, primarily through increased medical and media attention. Concomitantly, Americans have turned to medical treatments and pharmaceutical cocktails to achieve normalcy rather than attending to the social and cultural causes of sleep sickness. This turn toward pharmaceutic…
Extremities
Emergent conditions of life at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century create new opportunities and challenges for medical anthropology. The articles included in this special issue of Medical Anthropology suggest four areas that call out for more attention: the changing scientific and philosophical status of the human, including definitions of life and biology more broadly; the material consequences of anticipatory fictions; the e…
Natural Hegemonies
American capitalism finds its force and legitimacy in hegemonic understandings of nature and society, especially as expressed in human biology. In this article, I address the ways American capitalism depends on the deployment of sleep and wakefulness within the institutional contexts of school and labor, with particular attention to the recent medicalization of sleep disorders. Across American institutions and social science literature, I argue t…
The Nature of Sleep
In April of 2004, only a few months into my fieldwork, I was struck by the level and variety of doubt expressed by the physicians at the Midwest Sleep Disorder Center (MSDC). The MSDC is a group of physicians recognized in the field as experts in many areas of sleep medicine, especially parasomnias-such as sleepwalking, sleep-related eating, and REM behavior disorder. Dr. Richards, the clinic's senior researcher and a neurologist by training, beg…
Where Have All Our Naps Gone? Or Nathaniel Kleitman, the Consolidation of Sleep, and the Historiography of Emergence
In this article, I focus on two moments of Nathaniel Kleitman's career, specifically that of his Mammoth Cave experiment in the 1930s and his consultation with the United States military in the 1940s–1950s. My interests in bringing these two moments of Kleitman's career together are to examine the role of nature and the social in his understanding of human sleep and the legacies these have engendered for sleep science and medicine in the present;…
What's So Natural about Sleep
Additional informationNotes on contributorsMatthew Wolf-MeyerMatthew Wolf-Meyer is an associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. His work focuses on medicine, science, and media in the United States and draws on history, contemporary experiences, and popular representations of health and illness. He is author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (University of Minnesota Press, 20…
Disclosure as method, disclosure as dilemma
Jack had first experienced symptoms related to narcolepsy in his late thirties. Ryan had been diagnosed with almost all the conditions that a disordered sleeper could be diagnosed with narcolepsy. For both Jack and Ryan, the consequences of their disclosures endanger their status as employees and, by extension, their ability to meet their family obligations and other social commitments. Although ethnographers are exposed to the vulnerabilities of…
Myths of Modern American Sleep
Across different kinds of modern influences on human sleep—from communication and media technologies, to medical interventions and chemicals used to modify sleep and wakefulness, to the organization of social life—some are seen as interfering with human nature. Others, like many institutions, are accepted as natural. This is apparent in the example of school start times, which are widely assumed to be based on an agrarian past. Unlike modern medi…
Therapy, Remedy, Cure
Increasingly, there is a temporal differentiation among kinds of treatments available through medicine. Cures offer one-time resolution of symptoms; that is, with the benefit of a cure, there is no longer a medical problem in need of treatment. Remedies offer temporary, situational relief of symptoms. Therapies offer temporary relief of symptoms, but promise the possibility of nonsituational fixes, offering universal cessation of symptoms but onl…
Our Master's Voice, the Practice of Melancholy, and Minor Sciences
How do scientists and experts in marginal scientific fields think about themselves, their knowledge production, and their practices in relation to dominant sciences? In this article, drawing on fieldwork with a group of Lacanian psychoanalysts, I argue that what motivates much of the training, practice, and thought of some contemporary psychoanalysts is their place as practicing a minor science in relation to dominant forms of psychiatry and neur…
Unifying minor sciences and minor literatures
In this paper, we explore the possibility of using Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's theories of minor science and literature to examine the role of marginalized sciences, particularly in the United States. We suggest that by combining Deleuze and Guattari's work on minor sciences and minor literatures that the framework for an anthropology of science which takes alternative and marginalized sciences seriously can be established. To elucidate t…
Biomedicine, the whiteness of sleep, and the wages of spatiotemporal normativity in the United States
The racialization of individuals in the contemporary United States is increasingly accomplished through institutional actors, including scientists and physicians. As genetic health risks, chronic disease treatments, and pharmaceuticals come to define Americans' understanding of themselves, a fundamental shift is occurring in the way medicine is practiced and its role in the production of subjectivity. Underlying these changes is an expectation of…
Normal, Regular, and Standard
In 2013, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) held a workshop to determine the risks and benefits associated with the experimental use of fecal microbial transplants to treat Clostridium difficile and other gastroenterological disorders. By focusing on the proceedings of the NIH-FDA workshop on the treatment of the human microbiome, the question of how medicine colonizes human bodies through microbial…
Chronic Subjunctivity, or, How Physicians Use Diabetes and Insomnia to Manage Futures in the United States
Prognostication has become central to medical practice, offering clinicians and patients views of particular futures enabled by biomedical expertise and technologies. Drawing on research on diabetes care and sleep medicine in the United States, in this article we suggest that subjectivity is increasingly modeled on medical understandings of chronic illness. These chronic conceptions of the self and society instill in individuals an anxiety about …
American Normal
Key social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of "ide…
Theory for the World to Come
Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? The future has become increasingly difficult to imagine. We might be able to predict a few events, but imagining how looming disasters will coincide is simultaneously necessary and impossible. Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused A…
Neurological disorders, affective bioethics, and the nervous system
This article proposes a novel approach to bioethics, referred to as "affective bioethics", which draws on traditions in anthropology, science and technology studies, disability studies, and Spinozist materialism. By focusing on the case of Michael and Terri Schiavo, in which Terri's personhood and subjectivity are challenged by dominant forms of neurological reductivism in the USA, this article suggests that approaching her condition as a set of …
"Human Nature" and the Biology of Everyday Life
Anthropologists are well poised to contribute to an immanent theory of human physiological experiences that accounts for the broad social and environmental influences that shape individual and community experiences of health and disease. This article forwards a theory of "the biology of everyday life" as a means to conceptualize the interactions between institutional expectations of behavior, cultural norms, and biological plasticity. Drawing on …
Recomposing kinship
What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In exploring this position, I draw on accounts of disability and illness. First, I focus on an account of fecal microbial transplant use and the intimate connections the technology creates between the recipient and donor. This is followed with the case of a woman who relies upon facilitated communication to communicate with her social others, which depends o…
Facilitated personhood
Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational ties to others, including humans and nonhumans. American ideas about the individual are deeply ideological, obscuring the human relations that make 'personhood' a possible, desirable concept that motivates subjection. Attending to neurological disorders and the technologies that attempt to remedy communication impairments shows that not only is the lab…
Human-centred design, disability and bioethics
Human-centred design methodologies provide a means to align bioethical advocacy with the needs and desires of disabled people. As a method, human-centred design seeks to locate points of friction in an individual's experience of everyday interactions, specifically in relation to technologies, but potentially in relation to processes and institutions. By focusing on disabled persons and their experiences of institutional organisation, human-centre…
Sociology (21 obras) · Psychology (17 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Law (12 obras) · Epistemology (11 obras) · Law (9 obras) · Philosophy (9 obras) · Medicine (8 obras) · Anthropology (7 obras) · Philosophy (7 obras)