Aiming at the 'proper' body
How exoskeletons foster 'risky' bodies and conflicting knowledge regimes
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2250341 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Denisa Butnaru (0000-0002-3161-270X, Department of History and Sociology University of Konstanz Konstanz Germany, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2024 |
| Volume | 46 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 1136-1151 |
| Publication date | 2024-07-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Sociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/1467-9566.13757 |
| PMID | 38353501 |
| OpenAlex | W4391812310 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 41 |
Exoskeletal devices are new technologies that have been developed in the medical field to provide assistance and rehabilitation for persons with motor impairments. Among these impairments, spinal cord injury and stroke are the most common. Drawing on materials collected during multi-sited ethnography conducted in France, Germany and Switzerland from 2014 to 2019, I suggest that exoskeletons contribute to a more general process that I identify as 'aiming at the 'proper' body'. As they materially craft motor impaired bodies but also are responsible for datafication and dataveillance, exoskeletons allow to categorise new aspects of 'risky' bodies. Simultaneously, they foster conflicts between experts' perspectives about rehabilitation practice and the users' phenomenological experiences that exoskeletons aim to transform. After describing how exoskeletons expand the realm of contemporary medical technologies in their purpose of 'aiming at 'proper' bodies' while being 'miraculous', I identify two conceptions of 'risky' bodies: a first one related to materiality, a second one to processes of digitalisation to which exoskeletons actively participate. Finally, I investigate some conflicting levels between the regimes of expert knowledge and the phenomenological experiences of the users and reassess the latter's role in rehabilitation practice with exoskeletons
Exoskeleton · Simulation · Biomedical Ethics and Regulation · Computer Science · Empathy and Medical Education · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations · Psychology
A Networked Self and Human Augmentics, Artificial Intelligence, Sentience
Phenomenology of Illness
Cartesian Meditations
Enactivist Interventions
Phenomenology of Perception
Digital Health
Economy and Society
The Birth of the Clinic
Cultures of Expertise and the Management of Globalization
Ethnography in/of the World System
Global Assemblages
Self in the Loop
Risk
Ethnography through Thick and Thin
Economy and Society
Stuck data, dead data, and disloyal data
M-health and health promotion
The ineffable
Distributed corporeality
Risk and emotion
Self-Tracking for Health and the Quantified Self
The more-than-human sensorium
Exoskeletons, Rehabilitation and Bodily Capacities
Self-tracking, health and medicine
The Society of Algorithms
Smart textiles
Walking as a social practice
The diverse domains of quantified selves
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |