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Epilogue
Published in Silvia Camporesi, Mike McNamee, Bioethics, Genetics and Sport, 2018
Silvia Camporesi, Mike McNamee
The future of sport may be said to lie at the intersection of two trajectories: the geneticisation of the athlete, and the hyperbolic ‘cyborgysation’ of the athlete. These two axes intersect and raise fundamental questions about the significance of human nature, as already identified by Hoberman (1992) more than 25 years ago, which are core questions in bioethics and sports ethics writ large. Genetics and biomechanics raise unique questions about the role, and value, of technology in sport. What will our Olympic athlete in 30, or 50, years look like? The answer to that question depends on the answer to the question of how our average ‘human’ will look like. Genetically modified? Cyborg? A bit of both? Exciting, some say. Scary, perhaps terrifying, others reply. Future gazing is a precarious occupation. Nevertheless, sticking our heads in the sand and pretending that these changes are not happening, or may not happen, is not a meritorious response. We know from sports advances that once the technology is available, it will be used. The genie cannot be put back into the bottle. Ethical estimations and evaluations of the science and genetic future of sports medicine should be a driver to react critically, to tackle head-on difficult questions that will shape our conceptions not simply of sports or athletes, but of the human condition itself.
Genes, Kinship and Risk
Published in Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright, Anita Hardon, The Routledge Handbook of Medical Anthropology, 2016
Anita Hardon, Lenore Manderson, Elizabeth Cartwright
Interest in the cyborg in anthropology emerged in the 1990s, in response to developments in the field of assisted reproduction, including techniques such as in-vitro fertilization. Robbie Davis-Floyd and Joseph Dumit (1998), and the authors who contributed to their edited volume, point to the utility of an ethnographic inquiry that does not reject technologically assisted reproduction as unnatural. Instead, they argue, ethnographers should use the metaphor of the cyborg to better understand how reproduction is mediated by different kinds of technoscientific interventions, and the implications of this in terms of biological, cultural, and psychological evolution. More recently, Lenore Manderson (2011: 63) has observed that with the rapid development of bio-engineered options, cyborg bodies have become increasingly ordinary, even expected, just another item on a menu of medical interventions for people seeking treatment or repair.
Introducing material-discursive approaches to health and illness
Published in Lucy Yardley, Material discourses of health and illness, 2013
Once the material manifestations of society and culture are taken into consideration, not only speech and texts, but also architecture and agriculture, weapons and clothes, even bodies and babies, can be regarded as ‘discursive materials’ (Ibanez 1994). This conception of the relation between the discursive and material is epitomised in the popular postmodern image of people as ‘cyborgs’, a combination of living beings and constructed machines (Featherstone and Burrows 1995; Haraway 1991). Since the cyborg's body is acknowledged as a product of society, the notion of a cyborg transcends the distinctions between the natural (which is often conflated with physical) and the cultural (often equated with abstract). Humans are cyborgs in many senses. We transform our capacities by linking ourselves to machines: plugging our bodies into cars, our eyes into telescopes or microscopes, our mouths into telephones, and our brains into computers. Increasingly, we employ technology to modify ourselves, whether by means of the material technology of implantation or genetic selection, or through the cultural technology of education and self-regulation. And we can also be considered as part of a variety of technological systems—pre-eminently the various forms of the socio-economic system of production and consumption (Deleuze and Guattari 1984). Awareness of the way in which our physical existence forms part of a larger material—cultural system provides a counterpart to the discursive understanding of subjective experience as embedded in social relations and discourse.
Kathleen Mears Memorial Lecture: Telehealth — “This Is the Way”
Published in The Neurodiagnostic Journal, 2023
You may ask, “What about the future of healthcare and telehealth?” Telehealth will just be healthcare. We will continue to see a rise in hybrid care models of in-person and telehealth visits. Hospital systems will use telehealth to make themselves more effective and efficient at delivering care. Reduced travel and transfers for patients and providers will occur as telehealth connections continue to rise between their facilities. Implantable technology has been around for many years, and if we want to believe it or not, many of us walking the streets are cyborgs! We do not have Darth Vaders walking around, but more than 3,000,000 people in the U.S. have cardiac pacemakers or cardioverter defibrillators (Tseng et al. 2015). We will see more implantable technology with real-time remote patient monitoring (RPM) that will occur through our cellular phones and include emergency reporting and alerts if needed.
“You Know It’s Different in the Game Man”: Technodesiring, Technorelating, and TechnoBlackness as Analytical Modes of Queer Worldmaking in Black Mirror’s, “Striking Vipers”
Published in Journal of Homosexuality, 2023
To better understand how queer technorelating functions within technocultures, it is important to also connect it to established modes of studies about technocultures, especially regarding concepts like, cyborg, cyberqueer, and digisexuality. First, cyborg is used to describe the possibilities presented within technocultures where the relationship between flesh and the digital world is blurred (Haraway, 1991). Cyborg was conceptually introduced to describe how women could enter a digital space free of the real-world constraints of white patriarchy. Inside, she transforms into part human, part machine. Through this symbiosis the cyborg is born wherein there are no boundaries between the physical and nonphysical and instead become “chimeras theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism” (Haraway, 1991, p. 150). Cyborg then becomes an important part of queer technorelating as it shows how the liminal experience of being both physical and nonphysical can open realms of possibility outside of restrictive boundaries and oppressive systems.
Making Progress in the Ethics of Digital and Virtual Technologies for Mental Health
Published in AJOB Neuroscience, 2022
Perhaps this provocation, which has taken me years to begin to understand, helps to advance our field’s thinking about a neuroethics for cyborgs, which started over two decades ago (Wolpe, 2004). A key challenge, it seems to me, is how to retain the important emphasis on the “integrity” of the individual while also tackling its limitations. The assumption of the brain, or indeed the mind, as a fixed and isolated entity, with a self arising as an independent emergent construct, is not well aligned with the connectedness that is inherent in ‘techno-human’ development, or in the embodied multiplicities that interactions across virtual, digital and ‘real’ spaces demand, or in the requirement to make transparent the epistemological and structural limitations that form our being in the world.