“In this beautifully written study, Middleton offers a vivid account of experimental limb replacement. An empathetic guide, she tacks expertly between a Swedish bioengineering lab and the quotidian, home-based lives of half a dozen extraordinary patients who have survived traumatically severe limb injury and loss. <i>The Connector</i> proffers a superb melding of ethnographic and STS skill, insight, compassion, and wisdom.”—Lesley A. Sharp, Barbara C. And Helen C. Josefsberg '30 Professor of Anthropology, Barnard College, Columbia University<br /><br />“<i>The Connector</i> is an ethnographic masterpiece. Middleton’s bold rethinking of brain-science enigmas forges revelatory connections among the injured, neuro-prosthetics, and the intimate frontiers of human-machine life at home.”—Adriana Petryna, author of, <i>Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change</i>

In The Connector, Alexandra Middleton examines how the frontiers of experimental medical science are always the everyday lived experiences for patients and their families and communities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Swedish labs and clinics that develop neuromusculoskeletal protheses, as well as in the homes of patients enrolled in clinical trials as they live with these new forms of prosthetics, Middleton shows how patients’ sensory experiences and domestic worlds become key spaces of scientific knowledge production that extend well beyond their visits to the lab. Through storytelling that centers the patients’ embodied knowledge and labor, along with the scientists who work closely with them, Middleton depicts how “connection” entails inhabiting the liminal space between ideation and materialization, a space punctuated not only by breakthroughs and breakdowns, but the slow work of the everyday. The Connector critically examines where biomedical innovation, scientific discovery, and the “cutting edge” come from in ways that foreground the importance of the domestic spaces in which experimental science take place.
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Prelude: Only a Machine ix
Introduction 1
Part I. Producing and Sustaining a Connector
1. Domestic Lived Science 21
2. Experimental Labor 49
3. The Fourth Bottleneck 77
Interlude 1. Limited Edition 99
Part II. Living and Dwelling with a Connector
4. Phantom Signals 107
5. Reverse-Engineering Touch 151
6. Sense Making; Meaning Making 151
Interlude 2. Lunar Thai 171
7. Flickering Embodiments 175
8. Breakdown 207
Conclusion 225
Epilogue 235
Acknowledgments 237
Notes 243
References 249
Index 267
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Produktdetaljer

ISBN
9781478033745
Publisert
2026-05-12
Utgiver
Duke University Press
Vekt
572 gr
Høyde
229 mm
Bredde
152 mm
Aldersnivå
P, 06
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Antall sider
290

Biografisk notat

Alexandra Middleton is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.