Appel à contribution – Tracing the Future : Lines of Difference and Possibility in Medical Technology

American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting, Montreal, QC, Canada,
November 16-20, 2011

Co-organizers: Catherine Bliss, Tazin Karim, and Amy Moran-Thomas on behalf of the Science, Technology and Medicine (STM) Interest Group, Society for Medical Anthropology

New currents in medical technology striate our world with shifting tidemarks, lines which reinscribe meaning in the uncertain spaces between science and morality, health and illness, life and death. These shifting lines leave behind traces – relics, paper trails, precedents, and other residues that quietly shape our social worlds. They also give birth to new legacies – discursive dichotomies, paradigms, and caveats that define the logic of modern medicine. Through these processes, technologies are not simply artifacts of science – they are also infrastructures of ongoing experimentation and signification. These objects travel in unexpected ways through both institutional and local worlds, giving people new means through which to negotiate their own subjectivities and experiences. In doing so, they shift existing tidemarks and present new possibilities for imagining the future. This panel will shed light on the various ways medical technology reflects and reconstructs difference in modern medicine while producing legacies and traces that shape our social destinies. In particular, we ask:

* How do the social lives of new medical technologies shift existing tidemarks or reinscribe the boundaries that delineate objectivity from subjectivity, experimentality from treatment, healing from enhancement, or otherwise contour the limits of care and survival?
* How does the reciprocal and transformative relationship between humans and medical technology produce institutional legacies of prevention, development, or exclusion?
* How do artifacts of past medical inquiries and inventions resurface through the structures and uses of emergent health technologies, and how to these historical traces influence contemporary medical and social lives?

We seek papers exploring these and related questions regarding the influence of medical, pharmaceutical, surgical, and genetic technologies, especially the empirical realities and theoretical implications of how they impact constructions of difference and lines of possibility in modern medicine.

Please send titles and 250 word abstracts to: Tazin Karim (<mailto:karimtaz@msu.edu> karimtaz@msu.edu) and Amy Moran-Thomas (amoran@princeton.edu)

DEADLINE: APRIL 3, 2011