Bøker i Biopolitics-serien

Critically examines phantom limb pain and its relationship to prosthetic innovation, tracing the major shifts in knowledge of the causes and characteristics of the phenomenon.

Demonstrates just how much bioscience reproduces and changes our ideas about the meaning of life itself.

Examining the routine activities of epidemiology - grant applications, data collection, representations of research findings, and post-publication discussions of the interpretations and implications of study results, this book shows how social differences of race, social class, and gender are upheld by the scientific community.

Situates contemporary genomics within a history of genetics research yet is attentive to the new ways in which knowledge claims about heredity, race, and gender emerge and are articulated

A compilation of the primary texts-by Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Badiou, and other theorists-that laid the ground for contemporary thinking about biopolitics, or the relations between life and politics.

Since the invention of dextri-maltose and the subsequent rise of Similac in the early twentieth century, parents with access to clean drinking water have had a safe alternative to breast-milk. This book challenges the widespread belief that breastfeeding is medically superior to bottle-feeding.

Explores the surveillance, manipulations, erasures, and visibility of the body in the twenty-first century

A groundbreaking exploration of biocitizenshipCitizenship has a long, complex relationship with the body. In recent years, developments in biomedicine and biotechnology, as well as a number of political initiatives, grassroots efforts, and public policies have given rise to new ways in which bodies shape the idea and practices of citizenship, or what has been called ¿biocitizenship.¿ This book, the first collection of essays on the topic of biocitizenship, aims to examine biocitizenship as a mode of political action and expand readers¿ understanding of biopolitics. Organized into four distinct sections covering topics including AIDS, drug testing on the mentally ill, and force-feeding prisoners, Biocitizenship delves deep into the relationship between private and public identity, politics, and power. Composed of pieces by leading scholars from a wide variety of disciplines, Biocitizenship offers a clear and comprehensive discussion on biocitizenship, biopolitics, and groups that may be affected by this ever-growing dialogue. Authors address issues familiar to biopolitics scholarship such as gender, sexuality, class, race, and immigration, but also consider unique objects of study, such as incubators, dead bodies, and corporations. Biocitizenship seeks to question who may count as a biological citizen and for what reasons, an essential topic in an age in which the body and its health provide the conditions necessary for political recognition and agency.

A Hindu monk in Calcutta refuses to take his psychotropic medications. His psychiatrist explains that just as his body needs food, the drugs are nutrition for his starved mind. Does it matter how - or whether - patients understand their prescribed drugs? This book illuminates how biomedical, Ayurvedic, and homeopathic treatments are used in India.

Feminists today are re-imagining nature, biology, and matter in feminist thought and critically addressing new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience, epigenetics and other scientific disciplines. Mattering, edited by noted feminist scholar Victoria Pitts-Taylor, presents contemporary feminist perspectives on the materialist or 'naturalizing' turn in feminist theory, and also represents the newest wave of feminist engagement with science. The volume addresses the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human/non-human and nature/culture, elaborates on the entanglements of matter, knowledge, and practice, and addresses biological materialization as a complex and open process. This volume insists that feminist theory can take matter and biology seriously while also accounting for power, taking materialism as a point of departure to rethink key feminist issues. The contributors, an international group of feminist theorists, scientists and scholars, apply concepts in contemporary materialist feminism to examine an array of topics in science, biotechnology, biopolitics, and bioethics. These include neuralplasticity and the brain-machine interface; the use of biometrical identification technologies for transnational border control; epigenetics and the intergenerational transmission of the health effects of social stigma; ADHD and neuropharmacology; and randomized controlled trials of HIV drugs.A unique and interdisciplinary collection, Mattering presents in grounded, concrete terms the need for rethinking disciplinary boundaries and research methodologies in light of the shifts in feminist theorizing and transformations in the sciences.

Do doctors fix patients? Or do they heal them? For all of modern medicine’s many successes, discontent with the quality of patient care has combined with a host of new developments, from aging populations to the resurgence of infectious diseases, which challenge medicine’s overreliance on narrowly mechanistic and technical methods of explanation and intervention, or “fixing’ patients. The need for a better balance, for more humane “healing” rationales and practices that attend to the social and environmental aspects of health and illness and the experiencing person, is more urgent than ever. Yet, in public health and bioethics, the fields best positioned to offer countervailing values and orientations, the dominant approaches largely extend and reinforce the reductionism and individualism of biomedicine.The collected essays in To Fix or To Heal do more than document the persistence of reductionist approaches and the attendant extension of medicalization to more and more aspects of our lives. The contributors also shed valuable light on why reductionism has persisted and why more holistic models, incorporating social and environmental factors, have gained so little traction. The contributors examine the moral appeal of reductionism, the larger rationalist dream of technological mastery, the growing valuation of health, and the enshrining of individual responsibility as the seemingly non-coercive means of intervention and control. This paradigm-challenging volume advances new lines of criticism of our dominant medical regime, even while proposing ways of bringing medical practice, bioethics, and public health more closely into line with their original goals. Precisely because of the centrality of the biomedical approach to our society, the contributors argue, challenging the reductionist model and its ever-widening effects is perhaps the best way to press for a much-needed renewal of our ethical and political discourse.

Argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good

Argues that health is a concept, a norm, and a set of bodily practices whose ideological work is often rendered invisible by the assumption that it is a monolithic, universal good