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Tracing Autism

Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience

By Des Fitzgerald

In Tracing Autism, Des Fitzgerald offers an up-close account of the search for a neurological explanation of autism. As autism has gained cultural prominence with more diagnoses and more controversy, its biological causes remain elusive.

Through...

The Pulse of Modernism

Physiological Aesthetics in Fin-de-Siècle Europe

By Robert Michael Brain

Robert Brain traces the origins of artistic modernism to specific technologies of perception developed in late-nineteenth-century laboratories. Brain argues that the thriving fin-de-siècle field of “physiological aesthetics,” which sought physiological explanations for the capacity to...

The Clinic and Elsewhere

Addiction, Adolescents, and the Afterlife of Therapy

By Todd Meyers

Despite increasingly nuanced understandings of the neurobiology of addiction and a greater appreciation of the social and economic conditions that allow drug dependency to persist, there remain many unknowns regarding the individual experience of substance...

The Emergence of Genetic Rationality

Space, Time, and Information in American Biological Science, 1870-1920

By Phillip Thurtle

The emergence of genetic science has profoundly shaped how we think about biology. Indeed, it is difficult now to consider nearly any facet of human experience without first considering the gene. But this mode of...

Life as Surplus

Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era

By Melinda Edna Cooper

Focusing on the period between the 1970s and the present, Life as Surplus is a pointed and important study of the relationship between politics, economics, science, and cultural values in the United States today. Melinda...

HIV Interventions

Biomedicine and the Traffic between Information and Flesh

By Marsha Rosengarten

Winner of the Sociology of Health and Illness Book Prize

HIV has changed in the presence of recent biomedical technologies. In particular, the development of anti-retroviral therapies (ARVs) for the treatment of HIV was a significant...

Darwin's Pharmacy

Sex, Plants, and the Evolution of the Noosphere

By Richard M. Doyle

Are humans unwitting partners in evolution with psychedelic plants? Darwin’s Pharmacy shows they are by weaving the evolutionary theory of sexual selection and the study of rhetoric together with the science and literature of psychedelic...

Bioart and the Vitality of Media

By Robert E. Mitchell

Bioart -- art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice -- now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this...

Bits of Life

Feminism at the Intersections of Media, Bioscience, and Technology

By Anneke M. Smelik, Nina Lykke

Since World War II, the biological and technological have been fusing and merging in new ways, resulting in the loss of a clear distinction between the two. This entanglement of biology with technology isn't new,...

The Transparent Body

A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging

By Jose van Dijck

From the potent properties of X rays evoked in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to the miniaturized surgical team of the classic science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, the possibility of peering into the inner reaches of...

Affect and Artificial Intelligence

By Elizabeth A. Wilson

In 1950, Alan Turing, the British mathematician, cryptographer, and computer pioneer, looked to the future: now that the conceptual and technical parameters for electronic brains had been established, what kind of intelligence could be built?...

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves

The Rhetoric of Reproduction in Early Modern England

By Eve Keller

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time...