Papers by Marsha Rosengarten
Choice Reviews Online, Aug 1, 2010
Speculative Research, 2017
Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and pr... more Is another future possible? So called ‘late modernity’ is marked by the escalating rise in and proliferation of uncertainties and unforeseen events brought about by the interplay between and patterning of social–natural, techno–scientific and political-economic developments. The future has indeed become problematic. The question of how heterogeneous actors engage futures, what intellectual and practical strategies they put into play and what the implications of such strategies are, have become key concerns of recent social and cultural research addressing a diverse range of fields of practice and experience. Exploring questions of speculation, possibilities and futures in contemporary societies, Speculative Research responds to the pressing need to not only critically account for the role of calculative logics and rationalities in managing societal futures, but to develop alternative approaches and sensibilities that take futures seriously as possibilities and that demand new habits and practices of attention, invention, and experimentation.
Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2013
Innovation and Biomedicine
Innovation and Biomedicine
In this chapter we once again attend to the complex eventuations of PrEP RCTs but broaden our ana... more In this chapter we once again attend to the complex eventuations of PrEP RCTs but broaden our analytic horizons to situate these within an account of the relationship between globalization and localization. In other words, we look at the ways in which the specific emergence and role of abstraction in PrEP RCTs are played out as convolutions or, better, ‘involutions’ of globalizing and localizing processes. By drawing on the idea of involutions, in which the global emerges out of the local and vice versa, we return to the idea that PrEP RCTs are part of an assemblage that entails multiple and heterogeneous relations. Moreover, we imagine this assemblage topologically: topology, used circumspectly, seems to us to throw an inventive light on what PrEP RCTs are and can become. Most notably, topology allows us to trace how seemingly distal relations play a part in the eventuation of PrEP and clinical trials.
Medical Humanities
This article revisits long-standing critiques of the role of metaphor in immunological discourse.... more This article revisits long-standing critiques of the role of metaphor in immunological discourse. Drawing on Alfred North Whitehead’s speculative philosophy of organism, I focus on the use of metaphor to explain the process by which COVID-19 vaccine research is able to generate protective antibodies, the challenge of autoimmune disease and dengue fever antibodies. I suggest that metaphors are provoked by the perplexity that arises from presupposing that distinct morphological substances are the first order of reality. I conclude that rather than seeing metaphors as typically skewing conceptions of the body, as has been previously argued, those of memory, recognition and misrecognition may be instructive of a body in transition. Indeed, a process of transition that shows degrees of creativity. When gesturing towards the processual nature of infection and immunity, metaphors invite new modes of shared thinking across the disciplinary divide.
Goldsmiths Research Online. Goldsmiths - University of London. ...
Critical Public Health, 2020
Innovation and Biomedicine, 2013
In this chapter we provide a partial history of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as they have ... more In this chapter we provide a partial history of randomized controlled trials (RCTs) as they have been applied within the HIV field in pursuit of prevention technologies. These RCTs are mostly prior to pre-exposure prophylactics (PrEP) and the account presented here is meant to contextualize our main object of study, PrEP, and particularly the controversies that surrounded the first round of PrEP RCTs. Central to the story of the early PrEP trials as told by various interested parties (for example, activists, trialists) was the question of whether these trials were devised in what amounts to an unethical manner. Also at stake in these debates was whether these concerns could be equally applied to other HIV prevention trials. As we shall see, some actors have been adamant that the PrEP trials in which they were involved were ethical; others have maintained that the requirements to inform and protect participants were not met; and a third group have questioned why the early PrEP trials provoked controversy when, in their view, issues of protecting participants were not so different to other prevention trials. Informing all three positions are some key assumptions that underpin the rationale for clinical trials — a rationale in which RCTs come to be regarded as the ‘gold standard’ for achieving evidence-based research within the HIV field.
Body & Society, 2012
Articles Birke, Lynda, Animal Bodies in the Production of Scientific Knowledge: Modelling Medicin... more Articles Birke, Lynda, Animal Bodies in the Production of Scientific Knowledge: Modelling Medicine, 18(3&4), 156-178 Boero, Natalie and CJ Pascoe, Pro-anorexia Communities and Online Interaction: Bringing the Pro-ana Body Online, 18(2), 27-57 Cartwright, Lisa, The Hands of the Animator: Rotoscopic Projection, Condensation, and Repetition Automatism in the Fleischer Apparatus, 18(1), 47-78 Coleman, Beth, Everything is Animated: Pervasive Media and the Networked Subject, 18(1), 79-98 Cooper, Melinda, The Pharmacology of Distributed Experiment – ...
Speculative Research, 2017
The contribution of recalcitrant research subjects to the ‘failure’ of biomedical research outcom... more The contribution of recalcitrant research subjects to the ‘failure’ of biomedical research outcomes is proposed as a counter to ‘the atrophied decay’ of possibilities that, for A.N. Whitehead, come with the prioritizing by science to know in advance. By resisting the imposition of the rules of modern science, recalcitrance exposes another world of matterings. It thus poses a contrast to the otherwise imposed singularity of a world whose play of rules holds the future to the limits of the present.
Social Anthropology, 2020
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Papers by Marsha Rosengarten
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