mama ABSTRACTS
Abstract, Jim Edmonson, 29. august 2006:
From Casablanca to Vienna, Africa to Australia, Vancouver to Baltimore, couples across the centuries used plants, pots, potions, and pills to attempt to space their pregnancies. Before the advent of medical devices for contraception, women and men employed yams, honey, beeswax, stones, lemons, fennel, and Lysol. Despite medical advances, modern folks have tried plastic wrap, candy bar wrappers, and airplane parts. Each method, effective or not, carries its own human story. The Percy Skuy Collection on the History of Contraception documents these stories, and much more.
Abstract, Lynn Morgan, 26. september 2006:
Embryo in/formation:
The construction of embryo subjectivity in mid-20th century America
Lynn M. Morgan
Professor of Anthropology
Mount Holyoke College
Until the late 19th century, specimens of early human embryos were quite rare and found only by chance. Many people, including doctors, did not understand human development in embryological terms. Only after a small group of scientists began to collect and section thousands of human embryos in the late 19th and early 20th centuries did a standardized description of embryological development begin to emerge, accompanied by authoritative descriptions and images. Embryos are thus a relatively recent invention. Today, embryos are the central actors in the stories we tell ourselves about how we came to be. The most heated debates over stem cell research, in-vitro fertilization, abortion, emergency contraception, and cloning revolve around the status of embryos. This paper documents the rise to preeminence of the embryological worldview, which holds itself to be the true story of how life begins.
Abstract, Jenny Sundén, 3. oktober 2006:
Mary Shelleys Frankenstein från 1818 var det första litterära försöket att föreställa sig livet, inte som något först och främst naturligt, utan som något teknologiskt manipulerbart. Mot bakgrund av den tidens diskussioner kring elektricitet och livsskapande låter Shelley skapa ett hiskeligt – men ensamt – monster, som förgäves ber sin skapare om en följeslagerska. Konstruktionen av ett kvinnligt monster avbryts eftersom hon vore otänkbar. Idag är Frankensteins monster mer närvarande än någonsin, inte minst inom den ”nya biologin” samt inom robotiken där livets och kroppens gränser utforskas intensivt. Vad betyder det att vara artificiellt skapad i stället för ”naturligt” född? Hur visualiseras dagens förkroppsligade maskiner inom robotiken som konstart? Vad händer med den traditionella kopplingen mellan naturen och det kvinnliga i bioteknologins tidevarv, där högst subtila sammanblandningar mellan biologiskt material och teknologier äger rum? Utifrån strategiska nedslag inom svensk biokonst och robotik analyseras exempel från utställningen ”Today in Paradise: Genetics and Art” (Röda Sten, Göteborg, 2005) samt Åsa Unander-Scharins utställning ”Navigation” (Dansmuseet, Stockholm, 2005), med robotar och andra sensoriska skulpturer som dansar till klassisk musik.
Biografi:
Jenny Sundén är lektor i medieteknik på Skolan för datavetenskap och kommunikation vid Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan, Stockholm. Hon disputerade vid Tema kommunikation, Linköpings universitet, har varit gästforskare vid The English Department, UC Berkeley samt med hjälp av ett postdoktorsstipendium från STINT vistats vid INCITE (Incubator for Critical Inquiry into Technology and Ethnography), Department of Sociology, University of Surrey. Hennes forskning fokuserar främst på kulturstudier av digitala medier och bioteknologier, cyberfeminism, virtuella världar, online-etnografi och digital textlighet. Hon är författare till Material Virtualities: Approaching Online Textual Embodiment (2003, Peter Lang), samt medförfattare till Digital Borderlands: Cultural Studies of Identity and Interactivity on the Internet (2002, Peter Lang).
Abstract, Sybilla Nikolow, 24. oktober 2006:
Abstract
Imagined Communities. Statistical Images of Population.
Sybilla Nikolow, Institute for Science and Technology Studies, University of Bielefeld
When Walter Benjamin called the exhibitions in Interwar Berlin the “most forward posts in the field of visualising methods“, he referred not without reason to the numerious statistical exhibits in these arenas. Statistical images of population were an omnipresent phenomenon in health exhibitions and museums in the first half of the 20th century. They fascinated, because they gave the observer the impression he or she would recognise something new about him or herself by looking at the population as an entity. This was and is an illusion. In the images we don’t see ourselves, as we experience namely ourselves as individual human beings. What we see are statistical averages, that make sense in terms of reference values. But it is impossible to trace there back to the individual life of the person since that person has been absorbed in the statistics of the collective. The images of the population are – like other scientific images – highly abstract objects of knowledge. They were visualised for showing statistics in the public arena by the use of various instruments. Their existence as objects of knowledge is deeply rooted in the manifold and complex process of representation. Visualising statistical phenomena like for instance the age structure and its development within a particular population strata, means to produce these statistical constructs in the first place. In the exhibitions these images functioned as objects to transmit knowledge from and about imagined communities. They not only visualised knowledge and arguments that came from somewhere else, like the statistiscal bureau or the parliament. They are also the instruments to transmit the knowledge and the arguments that were produced for the public, as I will show in my examples. They serve in a didactical mission, in which the public was supposed to be enlightened about themselves. The processes of visualisation and popularisation are deeply connected in these cases. Therefore the production of knowledge is not understandable without taking into account the praxis of communicating the knowledge to the wider public.In my paper I will present the changing history of particular statistical images in taking examples from exhibitions and museums of the first half of the 20th century. I will discuss three dimensions of the process of rendering the population visible: First, the training of a statistical view on health and disease of the population; Second, the professionalisation of the business of popularisation with particular results for the production of images and objects; and third, the politics of statistics in the public to function as scientific and didactical objects at the same time. Here we will see how statistical images in the public change between its unaccesible abstractness and its visible concreteness with long reaching results for the politics of exhibitions even today.
