Making Death Matter: A Feminist Technoscience Study of Alzheimer's Sciences in the Laboratory
2016 (English)Doctoral thesis, monograph (Other academic)
Abstract [en]
This thesis is a contribution to feminist laboratory studies and a critical engagement with the natural sciences, or more precisely research on the biochemical workings and deadly relations of Alzheimer’s disease emanating from a year of field work in a Drosophila fly lab. The natural sciences have been a point of fascination within the field of gender studies for decades. Such sciences produce knowledge on what gets to count as nature and natural, healthy or sick, normal or not, and they have done it with great societal authority and impact throughout European modernity. However, feminist technoscience scholars argue that science and knowledge is socially produced, and political too. Concepts such as nature, animal, human, body, sex, and life itself are not simply given natural realities but phenomena processed through the naturecultures of the laboratory. Situated within such theoretical and methodological approaches, this thesis wonders how scientific facts about Alzheimer’s disease are made in the lab today. What kinds of realities, bodies and ethico-political concerns are enacted? Who gets to live and who gets to die in everyday laboratory practices? Theoretically, the thesis is grounded, particularly, within Karen Barad’s agential realism and posthumanist performativity, and as such it accounts for human and nonhuman entanglements through which AD is performed in the lab in relational ways. In other words, the thesis explores how AD is enacted in the bodies of transgenic fruit flies (Drosophila melanogaster), as these flies embody the disease, live and die with it. Last but not least, the thesis explores the materialities of death, dying, embodiment and biological waste in a biochemistry lab as constitutive parts of the produced knowledge about AD.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press , 2016. , p. 263
Series
Linköping Studies in Arts and Science, ISSN 0282-9800 ; 700
Keywords [en]
Agential realism, posthumanities, new materialism, feminist technoscience, STS, gender studies, Human Animal Studies, matters of practice, animal experimentation, spectrum of killability, agential asymmetry, Drosophila melanogaster, fruit flies, Alzheimer’s sciences, laboratory ethnography, biological waste, politics of categorization, mattering death, ethics of relationality., Agentiell realism, posthumaniora, nymaterialism, feministiska teknovetenskpliga studier, genusvetenskap, vetenskapliga praktiker, djurförsök, agentiell assymetri, fruktflugor, Alzheimers sjukdomar, labbetnografi, biologiskt avfall, döden, relationell etik, processontologi, Genusstudier, Cultural Studies, Kulturstudier, History of Ideas, Idé- och lärdomshistoria, Philosophy, Filosofi, Social Sciences Interdisciplinary, Tvärvetenskapliga studier inom samhällsvetenskap
National Category
Gender Studies Cultural Studies History of Ideas Philosophy Social Sciences Interdisciplinary
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kau:diva-72156DOI: 10.3384/diss.diva-132635ISBN: 9789176856550 (print)OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kau-72156DiVA, id: diva2:1318020
Public defence
2016-12-09, TEMCAS, TEMA-huset, Campus Valla, Linköping, 13:15 (English)
Opponent
Supervisors
2019-05-272019-05-242020-07-08Bibliographically approved