Personal health technologies, micropolitics and resistance: A new materialist analysis

Personal health technologies (PHTs) are near-body devices or applications designed for use by a single individual, principally outside healthcare facilities. They enable users to monitor physiological processes or body activity, are frequently communication-enabled, and sometimes also intervene therapeutically. This paper explores a range of PHTs, from blood pressure or blood glucose monitors purchased in pharmacies, fitness monitors such as FitBit and Nike+ Fuelband, through to drug pumps and implantable medical devices. It applies a new materialist analysis, first reverse engineering a range of PHTs to explore their micropolitics, and then forward-engineering PHTs to meet, variously, public health, corporate, patient and resisting-citizen agendas. The paper concludes with a critical discussion of PHTs, and the possibilities of designing devices and apps that might foster a subversive micropolitics and encourage collective and resisting ‘citizen-health’

Intra-acting with the IceCube Neutrino Observatory, or; how the technosphere may come to matter

This paper contends that a robust concept of the technosphere – indeed one that is truly adequate to the Anthropocene – must be approached using a plurality of methods that do not categorize agencies or rely on hierarchical scalar analysis. In this commentary, we draw from feminist science studies scholar Karen Barad’s philosophy of agential realism, and in particular her concept of ‘intra-action’, to identify the technosphere as emergent from entangled practices, sites and infrastructures, and to trace the technosphere from the ‘meso’ scale to subatomic and cosmological realms of force and energy. We demonstrate the value of a critical, intra-active approach to technical assemblages by thinking the technosphere concept with and within a vast experimental apparatus: the IceCube Neutrino Observatory

Britain, Bulgaria and benefits:the political rhetoric of European (dis)integration

This chapter considers the political controversy in Britain over the lifting of restrictions of freedom of movement on European Union (EU) citizens from Bulgaria and Romania in January 2014. The response of the then Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government centred on altering the rules on the payment of welfare benefits to potential new EU immigrants such that they would not be entitled to claim these benefits for 3 months after entry to the United Kingdom. This policy led to a split in the coalition, with the Liberal Democrat leadership claiming that it was a panicked move by the majority Conservative coalition partner, and moreover that it was a blatant attempt to appeal the electorate in an effort to be seen to be doing something to stop the welfare benefit system from being abused by ‘foreigners’. The backdrop to this political fracas centred on the economic contribution of East European immigrants to Britain and the claim and counterclaim over the issues jobs, welfare benefits and services such as English language support in schools. These contentious issues are examined in terms of an analysis of online comments to posted in reaction to a political interview with Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrat business secretary, who claimed that the Conservatives were attempting to placate public disquiet over immigration as a response to the rising popularity of the United Kingdom Independence Party

The Limits of Anthropocene Narratives

The rapidly growing transdisciplinary enthusiasm about developing new kinds of Anthropocene stories is based on the shared assumption that the Anthropocene predicament is best made sense of by narrative means. Against this assumption, this article argues that the challenge we are facing today does not merely lie in telling either scientific, socio-political, or entangled Anthropocene narratives to come to terms with our current condition. Instead, the challenge lies in coming to grips with how the stories we can tell in the Anthropocene relate to the radical novelty of the Anthropocene condition about which no stories can be told. What we need to find are meaningful ways to reconcile an inherited commitment to narrativization and the collapse of storytelling as a vehicle of understanding the Anthropocene as our current predicament

Blue space as caring space – water and the cultivation of care in social and environmental practice

This paper studies three sites or ‘landscapes of care’ in Leeds, Bristol and London where water and associated built and natural environments are used to co-construct and facilitate forms of social and environmental care. Our research narrates the ways in which blue spaces are cultivated for the production of particular forms of caring bodies and sensibilities. Interpreting care as both a doing (caring for) and emotion (caring about), we draw attention to the diverse practices and distributed nature of care in these environments. Our paper has three main insights. First, we draw attention to the role of water as both a material and site of care. Second, we identify a range of more-than-human benefits associated with blue spaces and how these emerge via collaborative, non-linear and reciprocal forms of care. Third, we argue that by understanding how care works in everyday social practice, new forms of ecological care and pro-environmental ways of living with the world can emerge

Temporal drag: transdisciplinarity and the 'case' of psychosocial studies

Psychosocial studies is a putatively ‘new’ or emerging field concerned with the irreducible relation between psychic and social life. Genealogically, it attempts to re-suture a tentative relation between mind and social world, individual and mass, internality and externality, norm and subject, and the human and non-human, through gathering up and re-animating largely forgotten debates that have played out across a range of other disciplinary spaces. If, as I argue, the central tenets, concepts and questions for psychosocial studies emerge out of a re-appropriation of what have become anachronistic or ‘useless’ concepts in other fields – ‘the unconscious’, for instance, in the discipline of psychology – then we need to think about transdisciplinarity not just in spatial terms (that is, in terms of the movement across disciplinary borders) but also in temporal terms. This may involve engaging with theoretical ‘embarrassments’, one of which – the notion of ‘psychic reality’ – I explore here

Posthumanist Education

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The DisHuman child

In this paper we consider the relationship between the human and disability; with specific focus on the lives of disabled children and young people. We begin with an analysis of the close relationship between ‘the disabled’ and ‘the freak’. We demonstrate that the historical markings of disability as object of curiosity and register of fear serve to render disabled children as non-human and monstrous. We then consider how the human has been constituted, particularly in the periods of modernity and the rise of capitalism, reliant upon the naming of disability as antithetical to all that counts as human. In order to find a place for disabled children in a social and cultural context that has historically denied their humanity and cast them as monstrous others, we develop the theoretical notion of the DisHuman: a bifurcated complex that allows us recognise their humanity whilst also celebrating the ways in which disabled children reframe what it means to be human. We suggest that the lives of disabled children and young people demand us to think in ways that affirm the inherent humanness in their lives but also allow us to consider their disruptive potential: this is our DisHuman child. We draw on our research projects to explore three sites where the DisHuman child emerges in moments where sameness and difference, monstrosity/disability and humanity are invoked simultaneously. We explore three locations – (i) DisDevelopment; (ii) DisFamily and (iii) DisSexuality – illuminating the ways in which the DisHuman child seeks nuanced, politicized and complicating forms of humanity

Empathy at Play:Embodying Posthuman Subjectivities in Gaming

In this article, we address the need for a posthuman account of the relationship between the avatar and player. We draw on a particular line of posthumanist theory associated closely with the work of Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti and N. Katherine Hayles that suggests a constantly permeable, fluid and extended subjectivity, displacing the boundaries between human and other. In doing so, we propose a posthuman concept of empathy in gameplay, and we apply this concept to data from the first author’s 18-month ethnographic field notes of gameplay in the MMORPG World of Warcraft. Exploring these data through our analysis of posthuman empathy, we demonstrate the entanglement of avatar–player, machine–human relationship. We show how empathy allows us to understand this relationship as constantly negotiated and in process, producing visceral reactions in the intra-connected avatar–player subject as well as moments of co-produced in-game action that require ‘affective matching’ between subjective and embodied experiences. We argue that this account of the avatar–player relationship extends research in game culture, providing a horizontal, non-hierarchical discussion of its most necessary interaction