Abstract

It’s well-known that medical practices can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. Drawing on in-depth analyses of medical devices such as the spirometer (Braun 2014) and pulse oximeter (Moran-Thomas 2020), recent scholars have argued that ideologies are perpetuated not only by practices, but are also materially embedded in instruments and devices. In other words, medical devices ‘materialize oppression’ (Liao and Carbonell 2022).

In this talk, I pose the following question: how exactly do medical devices materialize oppression? That is, what are the specific mechanisms by which oppression becomes materialized? I offer a preliminary, non-exhaustive taxonomy of materialization mechanisms. And I do so by focusing on new examples and case studies that illustrate these mechanisms at work within medical data infrastructures rather than devices and instruments. I argue that a clearer view of how these mechanisms operate suggests possibilities for building medical technologies that liberate rather than oppress.

References:

• Braun, Lundy. 2014. Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirometer from Plantation to Genetics. 1st edition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
• Liao, Shen-yi, and Vanessa Carbonell. 2022. ‘Materialized Oppression in Medical Tools and Technologies.’ The American Journal of Bioethics, March, 1–15.
• Moran-Thomas, A. 2020. ‘How a popular medical device encodes racial bias.’ Boston Review, August 5, 2020.