Books in the Theory, Technology and Society series

What happens to the patient in a technologized medical environment? How are doctors', nurses' and medical scientists' practices changed when artefacts are involved? This book addresses these developments and dilemmas, focusing on various practices with technologies within hospitals and sociotechnical systems of care.

Drawing on social science perspectives, this book presents empirical studies that engage with the often shifting and day-to-day realities of life sciences categories. It shows how such categories remain contested and dynamic, and that the boundaries they create are subject to negotiation as well as re-configuration and re-stabilization processes.

Studies contemporary bio-objects, or the categories, materialities and processes that are central to the configuring of life, as they emerge, stabilize and circulate through society. Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, this title explores ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life.

Examining a variety of bio-objects in contexts beyond the laboratory, Bio-Objects: Life in the 21st Century explores new ways of thinking about how novel bio-objects enter contemporary life, analysing the manner in which the boundaries between human and animal, organic and non-organic, and being 'alive' and the suspension of living, are questioned, destabilised and in some cases re-established.

Disrupting, questioning and altering the taken-for-granted 'cosmos' of everyday life, the experiences of illness challenge the different ways in which social normalcy is remembered, maintained and expected. Using rich qualitative and ethnographic data alongside print and on-line media sources.

Examining the proliferation of human genomics across contemporary media cultures, this book engages with questions of what it means for a science to become so thoroughly part of every day life.