Technoscientific Musings at WUSTL

When I was reading Karin Knorr Cetina’s paper “Epistemic cultures: How the Sciences Make Knowledge”, I really gained an appreciation for how my anthropological studies balance out my biology and science studies. Knorr-Cetina discussed how laboratories strive to provide an “enhanced” environment that improves upon natural orders, and this did remind of my own days in the laboratory. I remember being so confused when we would try to form graphs from our data, and my lab mentors would tell me to have a threshold for my data. This threshold would often be somewhat arbitrary, and any points that resided outside of the threshold would be thrown out on the grounds of probable technical error. Science’s tendency to standardize their information inevitably results in seeking to eradicate outliers, whereas anthropology tries to focus on these outliers by looking at specific case studies and trying to analyze why they are different. This culture of standardization can be seen not only in science, but also in education or public policies, and I imagine it is a coping method in response to increasing globalization, but it is also very problematic. For example, we have seen instances where symptoms for ADHD have been assumed to be the same across genders, resulting in missed diagnoses for many young girls.

I thought that “The Biological Construction of Race” was incredibly interesting, and especially pertinent in today’s times. I was actually having a conversation with an acquaintance the other day that I thought was relevant to this paper. My friend is a nurse, and she was expressing her frustration with the issue of transgender people, and how, by introducing themselves to her as their preferred gender instead of their biological gender, there were legitimate medical issues that could come up. At first I was shocked by her seeming transphobia, but as she explained, while I didn’t agree with all of her points, I still understood that there may be problems that arise due to this. As someone who tries to consider myself rather sensitive to social issues, this was a difficult thing for me to think about. Of course I want to have respect for others’ identities, but in a medical setting where biology overtakes the social and psychological aspect of bodies, what is the most important? I thought this related well with what Fullwiley referred to as a “crisis of representation” in a similar way.