Picturing Personhood

By showing us the human brain at work, PET (positron emission tomography) scans are subtly--and sometimes not so subtly--transforming how we think about our minds. Picturing Personhood follows this remarkable and expensive technology from the laboratory into the world and back. It examines how PET scans are created and how they are being called on to answer myriad questions with far-reaching implications: Is depression an observable brain disease? Are criminals insane? Do men and women think differently? Is rationality a function of the brain? Based on interviews, media analysis, and participant observation at research labs and conferences, Joseph Dumit analyzes how assumptions designed into and read out of the experimental process reinforce specific notions about human nature. Such assumptions can enter the process at any turn, from selecting subjects and mathematical models to deciding which images to publish and how to color them. Once they leave the laboratory, PET scans shape social debates, influence courtroom outcomes, and have positive and negative consequences for people suffering mental illness. Dumit follows this complex story, demonstrating how brain scans, as scientific objects, contribute to our increasing social dependence on scientific authority. The first book to examine the cultural ramifications of brain-imaging technology, Picturing Personhood is an unprecedented study that will influence both cultural studies and the growing field of science and technology studies.

At the start of the twenty-first century, America is in the midst of a profound national reconsideration of the death penalty. There has been a dramatic decline in the number of people being sentenced to death as well as executed, exonerations have become common, and the number of states abolishing the death penalty is on the rise. The essays featured in The Road to Abolition? track this shift in attitudes toward capital punishment, and consider whether or not the death penalty will ever be abolished in America. The interdisciplinary group of experts gathered by Charles J. Ogletree Jr., and Austin Sarat ask and attempt to answer the hard questions that need to be addressed if the death penalty is to be abolished. Will the death penalty end only to be replaced with life in prison without parole? Will life without the possibility of parole become, in essence, the new death penalty? For abolitionists, might that be a pyrrhic victory? The contributors discuss how the death penalty might be abolished, with particular emphasis on the current debate over lethal injection as a case study on why and how the elimination of certain forms of execution might provide a model for the larger abolition of the death penalty.

In this landmark Companion, expert contributors from around the world map out the field of the critical medical humanities. This is the first volume to introduce comprehensively the ways in which interdisciplinary thinking across the humanities and social sciences might contribute to, critique and develop medical understanding of the human individually and collectively. The thirty-six newly commissioned chapters range widely within and across disciplinary fields, always alert to the intersections between medicine, as broadly defined, and critical thinking. Each chapter offers suggestions for further reading on the issues raised, and each section concludes with an Afterword, written by a leading critic, outlining future possibilities for cutting-edge work in this area. Topics covered in this volume include: the affective body, biomedicine, blindness, breath, disability, early modern medical practice, fatness, the genome, language, madness, narrative, race, systems biology, performance, the postcolonial, public health, touch, twins, voice and wonder. Together the chapters generate a body of new knowledge and make a decisive intervention into how health, medicine and clinical care might address questions of individual, subjective and embodied experience.

Exposing ethical dilemmas of neuroscientific research on violence, this book warns against a dystopian future in which behavior is narrowly defined in relation to our biological makeup. Biological explanations for violence have existed for centuries, as has criticism of this kind of deterministic science, haunted by a long history of horrific abuse. Yet, this program has endured because of, and not despite, its notorious legacy. Today's scientists are well beyond the nature versus nurture debate. Instead, they contend that scientific progress has led to a nature and nurture, biological and social, stance that allows it to avoid the pitfalls of the past. In Conviction Oliver Rollins cautions against this optimism, arguing that the way these categories are imagined belies a dangerous continuity between past and present. The late 1980s ushered in a wave of techno-scientific advancements in the genetic and brain sciences. Rollins focuses on an often-ignored strand of research, the neuroscience of violence, which he argues became a key player in the larger conversation about the biological origins of criminal, violent behavior. Using powerful technologies, neuroscientists have rationalized an idea of the violent brain—or a brain that bears the marks of predisposition toward "dangerousness." Drawing on extensive analysis of neurobiological research, interviews with neuroscientists, and participant observation, Rollins finds that this construct of the brain is ill-equipped to deal with the complexities and contradictions of the social world, much less the ethical implications of informing treatment based on such simplified definitions. Rollins warns of the potentially devastating effects of a science that promises to "predict" criminals before the crime is committed, in a world that already understands violence largely through a politic of inequality.

Featuring a foreword by renowned neuroscientist Joseph E. LeDoux, The Elusive Brain is an illuminating, comprehensive survey of contemporary literature’s engagement with neuroscience. This fascinating book explores how literature interacts with neuroscience to provide a better understanding of the brain’s relationship to the self. Jason Tougaw surveys the work of contemporary writers—including Oliver Sacks, Temple Grandin, Richard Powers, Siri Hustvedt, and Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay—analyzing the way they experiment with literary forms to frame new views of the immaterial experiences that compose a self. He argues that their work offers a necessary counterbalance to a wider cultural neuromania that seeks out purely neural explanations for human behaviors as varied as reading, economics, empathy, and racism. Building on recent scholarship, Tougaw’s evenhanded account will be an original contribution to the growing field of neuroscience and literature.

What are living bodies made of? Protein modelers tell us that our cells are composed of millions of proteins, intricately folded molecular structures on the scale of nanoparticles. Proteins twist and wriggle as they carry out the activities that keep cells alive. Figuring out how to make these unruly substances visible, tangible, and workable is a challenging task, one that is not readily automated, even by the fastest computers. Natasha Myers explores what protein modelers must do to render three-dimensional, atomic-resolution models of these lively materials. Rendering Life Molecular shows that protein models are not just informed by scientific data: model building entangles a modeler’s entire sensorium, and modelers must learn to feel their way through the data in order to interpret molecular forms. Myers takes us into protein modeling laboratories and classrooms, tracking how gesture, affect, imagination, and intuition shape practices of objectivity. Asking, ‘What is life becoming in modelers' hands?’ she tunes into the ways they animate molecules through their moving bodies and other media. In the process she amplifies an otherwise muted liveliness inflecting mechanistic accounts of the stuff of life.

This groundbreaking book argues that health and medical media, with their unique goals and production values, constitute a rich cultural and historical archive and deserve greater scholarly attention. Original essays by leading media scholars and historians of medicine demonstrate that Americans throughout the twentieth century have learned about health, disease, medicine, and the human body from movies. Heroic doctors and patients fighting dread diseases have thrilled and moved audiences everywhere; amid changing media formats, medicine's moving pictures continue to educate, entertain, and help us understand the body's journey through life. Perennially popular, health and medical media are also complex texts reflecting many interests and constituencies including, notably, the U.S. medical profession, which has often sought, if not always successfully, to influence content, circulation, and meaning. Medicine's Moving Pictures makes clear that health and medical media representations are "more than illustrations," shows their power to shape health perceptions, practices, and policies, and identifies their social, cultural, and historical contexts. Contributors: Lisa Cartwright, Vanessa Northington Gamble, Rachel Gans-Boriskin, Valerie Hartouni, Susan E. Lederer, John Parascandola, Martin S. Pernick, Leslie J. Reagan, Naomi Rogers, Nancy Tomes, Paula A. Treichler, Joseph Turow Leslie J. Reagan is an associate professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Nancy Tomes is a professor at Stony Brook University; Paula A. Treichler is a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Medical imaging technologies can help diagnose and monitor patients’ diseases, but they do not capture the lived experience of illness. In this volume, Devan Stahl shares her story of being diagnosed with multiple sclerosis with the aid of magnetic resonance images (MRIs). Although clinically useful, Stahl did not want these images to be the primary way she or anyone else understood her disease or what it is like to live with MS. With the help of her printmaker sister, Darian Goldin Stahl, they were able to reframe these images into works of art. The result is an altogether different image of the ill body. Now, the Stahls open up their project to four additional scholars to help shed light on the meaning of illness and the impact medical imaging can have on our cultural imagination. Using their insights from the medical humanities, literature, visual culture, philosophy, and theology, the scholars in this volume advance the discourse of the ill body, adding interpretations and insights from their disciplinary fields.