*CFP* "SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES AND HEALTH PRAXIS: GENETIC SCIENCE AND NEW DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES", EDITED BOOK

Tina Sikka is pleased to extend an invitation for an expression of interest for an edited collection I am working on with Bristol University Press titled, "Science and Technology Studies and Health Praxis: Genetic Science and New Digital Technologies." The details are listed below. Do let me know if you are interested and able to contribute, or if you have any questions (tina.sikka@newcastle.ac.uk). A formal call for abstracts will follow shortly. I am really excited about the collection and would love to have a contribution that reflects some of the interesting work being done by scholars on the list.

This edited collection invites chapters from a variety of fields aimed at the interdisciplinary study of the latest health (digital and genetic) technologies using a variety of forward-looking STS methods (the socio-technical, radical democratisation, feminist technoscience, new materialism, laboratory studies, radical/auto ethnography, case studies etc.). What makes these health technologies unique, and therefore demands study, is that they constitute an embodied and mediated health ecosystem based on neoliberal logics that promise bio-molecular transformations of who we are in particular ways. The book will be primarily aimed at scholarly and student readers in critical STS, race, gender, socio-economic status, sexuality and health studies. Each chapter will apply some form of STS based method, approach, or theoretical frame (e.g. case studies, ANT, controversies, feminist technoscience/STS, Indigenous and Postcolonial STS, co-production and co-constitution, socio-material analysis, ethnographies) within the following framework:

 

1. STS, Health Knowledge, and the Body

• How new health technologies (digital and genetic) are changing how we relate to our material, embodied selves;
• The representation, communication, and internalization of health knowledge (mediated and unmediated);
• The economic and cultural inequalities that result from these technologies, practices/performances, and changing definitions of ‘good health’;
• How health norms, practices, and technologies are taken up and experienced by raced and gendered individuals and groups in embodied ways;
• How fatness intersects with science, technology, normativity, and equality.

 

2. STS, Health and Subjectivity/Identity

• How health technologies have transformed and produced new subjectivities, relations to the body, and relations to the natural world;
• The study of the way in which ways in which health is tied to and reflects overlapping identities vis-à-vis health disparities;
• How the social construction of race, sexuality, class, dis/ability and gender are expressed by and through digital and genetic technologies in novel ways;
• The study of forms of sociality that these technologies might encourage/discourage;

 

3. New Frontiers in Health STS

• The nature of scientific knowledge (production and distribution) as it relates to genetically and epigenetically based knowledge about health;
• The novel and changing nature and character of new health technologies;
• The impact of genetically-based knowledge regimes on our understanding of who we are (in particular around race, indigeneity, sexuality);
• How these technologies are wound up and deeply implicated in (surveillance) capitalism;
• How these technologies are co-produced and the ways in which gender, race, class, sexuality, and dis/ability might be reflected in and through future health technologies.
• The ways in which power and inequality are reflected and reproduced by these technologies, discourses, and practices.

 

Timeline

January 2021 – finalise chapters

September 2021 – chapter draft submission

December 2021 – return edited drafts for revision

March 2022 – final submissions of chapters

April 2022 – Introduction, final revisions

Completion: May/June 2022