Organized on behalf of the Science, Technology and Medicine Interest Group of the Society for Medical Anthropology.

Talk of scientific and technological breakthroughs is a central trope in medicine, suggesting life and the future as objects that can be experimented and tinkered with. This session explores what the focus on scientific innovation and technical fix forecloses in medical inquiry and practice. As breakthroughs open new areas of research and intervention, they make others irrelevant and unthinkable. Which realities, practices, and styles of thought are relegated to “history,” abandoned, or ignored through the emphasis on innovations in the medical sciences and in public health? What do such foreclosures tell us about current value systems in science and medicine, control, and human becomings?

We are interested in ethnographic accounts that can lend insight into the ways that new sciences and technologies “breakdown” (instead of breakthrough) institutions and social fields as they are created and used in particular circumstances. By looking at what and who is excluded or cordoned off by the valorization of the new, we can gain insights into the ethic and politics informing the expansion of experimental regimes. We can also publicly account for people and questions that remain unnoticed or are disenfranchised in struggles over what kinds of knowledge count as science and in the commercialization of knowledge. As innovations are associated with possibility, agency, and progress how do those outside of technological and scientific regimes become naturalized as sites of impossibility, stagnancy, designated to be only resources for innovation or intervention?

Finally, keeping with the general theme of “anthropological end/s” we encourage papers that turn this critical approach on what is lost on our own discipline. Does an anthropological emphasis on the “emergent” and the “new” risk reproducing the trope of scientific and technological progress and what might this foreclose? Which other research imagination and partnerships are called for?

Organizers: Ian Whitmarsh, Alex Choby, Lara Braff, Ramah McKay, and Megan Crowley-Matoka

Please submit a 250 word abstract to Ian Whitmarsh (Whitmarshi@dahsm.ucsf.edu) and Alex Choby (ADMChoby@aol.com) by March 26, 2009