Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life - Paperback

by Regula Valérie Burri (Editor), Joseph Dumit (Editor)

This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, history, sociology and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its material, epistemic and social implications.

Author Biography

Regula Valérie Burri is an affiliated research fellow at Collegium Helveticum, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) and University of Zurich. Her doctoral thesis, "Doing Images: Zur Praxis medizinischer Bilder" (forthcoming), explores the social and cultural implications of medical imaging. She has been a Swiss National Science Foundation research fellow and holds appointments with several Swiss universities. Her research interests focus on the relationship between science, technology, and society. She is the coauthor of "Social Studies of Scientific Images and Visualization," in Ed Hackett et al., The Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (with Joseph Dumit; MIT Press).

Joseph Dumit is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology and the director of the program in Science and Technology Studies at University of California, Davis. His research interests are the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine; medical anthropology; and social studies. He is the author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity (Princeton University Press, 2004); and the coeditor of Cyborgs & Citadels: Anthropological Interventions in Emerging Sciences and Technologies (with Gary L. Downey; SAR Press, 1997), and Cyborg Babies: From Techno-Sex to Techno-Tots (with Robbie Davis-Floyd; Routledge, 1998). Dumit is the associate editor of the journal Culture, Medicine & Psychiatry.