How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression
Name
How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression.pdf
Size
1.03 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
3f47482ddb8e5f807eefadd678d74b45
Author(s)
Boulicault, Marion
Date Issued
April 3, 2023
Journal
The American Journal of Bioethics
Publisher
Taylor & Francis
Citation
Boulicault, M. (2023). How Medical Technologies Materialize Oppression. The American Journal of Bioethics, 23(4), 40–43.
Version
Final published version
Abstract
Biomedical practice can encode and perpetuate oppressive ideologies. This encoding and perpetuation, scholars like Liao and Carbonell (Citation2023) convincingly argue, can occur not only via social practices, but also through medical technologies themselves. In other words, medical technologies can “materialize oppression”: they can be biased in a way that systematically “reflects and perpetuates unjust power relations” (Liao and Carbonell Citation2023, 9).
In this paper, I examine how medical technologies materialize oppression, offering a preliminary, non-exhaustive taxonomy of the mechanisms of this materialization. While scholars like Liao and Carbonell focus primarily on physical medical instruments, I offer new examples that illustrate these mechanisms at work, focusing on medical data classification technologies and infrastructures. A clearer view of how these mechanisms operate suggests possibilities for building technologies that liberate rather than oppress.
MIT Department
MIT Schwarzmann College of Computing
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Philosophy
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1080/15265161.2023.2186528
