Autorentext

Alexandra Middleton is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

Klappentext

In The Connector, Alexandra Middleton examines how the frontiers of experimental medical science are always the everyday lived experiences for patients and their families and communities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Swedish labs and clinics that develop neuromusculoskeletal protheses, as well as in the homes of patients enrolled in clinical trials as they live with these new forms of prosthetics, Middleton shows how patients’ sensory experiences and domestic worlds become key spaces of scientific knowledge production that extend well beyond their visits to the lab. Through storytelling that centers the patients’ embodied knowledge and labor, along with the scientists who work closely with them, Middleton depicts how “connection” entails inhabiting the liminal space between ideation and materialization, a space punctuated not only by breakthroughs and breakdowns, but the slow work of the everyday. The Connector critically examines where biomedical innovation, scientific discovery, and the “cutting edge” come from in ways that foreground the importance of the domestic spaces in which experimental science take place.

Inhalt

Prelude: Only a Machine ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Producing and Sustaining a Connector

1. Domestic Lived Science 21
2. Experimental Labor 49
3. The Fourth Bottleneck 77
   Interlude 1. Limited Edition 99
   Part II. Living and Dwelling with a Connector
4. Phantom Signals 107
5. Reverse-Engineering Touch 151
6. Sense Making; Meaning Making 151
   Interlude 2. Lunar Thai 171
7. Flickering Embodiments 175
8. Breakdown 207
   Conclusion 225
   Epilogue 235
   Acknowledgments 237
   Notes 243
   References 249
   Index 267