How race became embedded in a medical instrument In the antebellum South, plantation physicians used a new medical device—the spirometer—to show that lung volume and therefore vital capacity were supposedly less in black slaves than in white citizens. At the end of the Civil War, a large study of racial difference employing the spirometer appeared to confirm the finding, which was then applied to argue that slaves were unfit for freedom. What is astonishing is that this example of racial thinking is anything but a historical relic. In Breathing Race into the Machine, science studies scholar Lundy Braun traces the little-known history of the spirometer to reveal the social and scientific processes by which medical instruments have worked to naturalize racial and ethnic differences, from Victorian Britain to today. Routinely a factor in clinical diagnoses, preemployment physicals, and disability estimates, spirometers are often “race corrected,” typically reducing normal values for African Americans by 15 percent. An unsettling account of the pernicious effects of racial thinking that divides people along genetic lines, Breathing Race into the Machine helps us understand how race enters into science and shapes medical research and practice. Honorable Mention, 2017 Rachel Carson Prize, Society for the Social Studies of Science Winner of the 2018 Ludwik Fleck Prize from the Society for Social Studies of Science

Our knowledge of breathing has shaped our social history and philosophical beliefs since prehistory. Breathing occupied a spiritual status for the ancients, while today it is central to the practice of many forms of meditation, like Yoga. Over time physicians, scientists, and engineers have pieced together the intricate biological mechanisms of breathing to devise ever more sophisticated devices to support and maintain breathing indefinitely, from iron lungs to the modern ventilator. Breathing supplementary oxygen has allowed us to conquer Everest, travel to the Moon, and dive to ever greater ocean depths. We all expect to breathe fresh and clean air, but with an increase in air pollution that expectation is no longer being met. Today, respiratory viruses like COVID-19 are causing disasters both human and economical on a global scale. This is the story of breathing—a tale relevant to everyone.

This open access book presents five different approaches to reading breath in literature, in response to texts from a range of historical, geographical and cultural environments. Breath, for all its ubiquity in literary texts, has received little attention as a transhistorical literary device. Drawing together scholars of Medieval Romance, Early Modern Drama, Fin de Siècle Aesthetics, American Poetics and the Postcolonial Novel, this book offers the first transhistorical study of breath in literature. At the same time, it shows how the study of breath in literature can contribute to recent developments in the Medical Humanities.

Breathing is not a common subject in feminist studies. Breathing Matters introduces this phenomenon as a forceful potentiality for feminist intersec-tional theories, politics, and social and environmental justice. By analyzing the material and discursive as well as the natural and cultural enactments of breath in black lung disease, phone sex work, and anxieties and panic attacks, Breathing Matters proposes a nonuniver salizing and politicized understanding of embodiment. In this approach, human bodies are conceptualized as agential actors of intersectional poli-tics. Magdalena Górska argues that struggles for breath and for breathable lives are matters of differential forms of political practices in which vulnera-ble and quotidian corpomaterial and corpo-affective actions are constitutive of politics. Set in the context of feminist poststructuralist and new materialist and postconstructionist debates, Breathing Matters offers a discussion of human embodiment and agency reconfigured in a posthumanist manner. Its interdisciplinary analytical practice demonstrates that breathing is a phenomenon that is important to study from scientific, medical, political, environmental and social perspectives.

Rooted in a global, transnational perspective, Athletic Activism: Global Perspectives on Social Transformation demonstrates how athletic activism can not only impact global discourse about inequity across various social location, but foster institutional change that advances social justice.

From everyday apps to complex algorithms, Ruha Benjamin cuts through tech-industry hype to understand how emerging technologies can reinforce White supremacy and deepen social inequity. Benjamin argues that automation, far from being a sinister story of racist programmers scheming on the dark web, has the potential to hide, speed up, and deepen discrimination while appearing neutral and even benevolent when compared to the racism of a previous era. Presenting the concept of the “New Jim Code,” she shows how a range of discriminatory designs encode inequity by explicitly amplifying racial hierarchies; by ignoring but thereby replicating social divisions; or by aiming to fix racial bias but ultimately doing quite the opposite. Moreover, she makes a compelling case for race itself as a kind of technology, designed to stratify and sanctify social injustice in the architecture of everyday life. This illuminating guide provides conceptual tools for decoding tech promises with sociologically informed skepticism. In doing so, it challenges us to question not only the technologies we are sold but also the ones we ourselves manufacture. Visit the book's free Discussion Guide: www.dropbox.com

Presents a powerful new vision of the history of science through the lens of disability studies. Disability has been a central—if unacknowledged—force in the history of science, as in the scientific disciplines. Across historical epistemology and laboratory research, disability has been “good to think with”: an object of investigation made to yield generalizable truths. Yet disability is rarely imagined to be the source of expertise, especially the kind of expertise that produces (rational, neutral, universal) scientific knowledge. This volume of Osiris places disability history and the history of science in conversation to foreground disability epistemologies, disabled scientists, and disability sciencing (engagement with scientific tools and processes). Looking beyond paradigms of medicalization and industrialization, the volume authors also examine knowledge production about disability from the ancient world to the present in fields ranging from mathematics to the social sciences, resulting in groundbreaking histories of taken-for-granted terms such as impairment, infirmity, epidemics, and shōgai. Some contributors trace the disabling impacts of scientific theories and practices in the contexts of war, factory labor, insurance, and colonialism; others excavate racial and settler ableism in the history of scientific facts, protocols, and collections; still others query the boundaries between scientific, lay, and disability expertise. Contending that disability alters method, authors bring new sources and interpretation techniques to the history of science, overturn familiar narratives, apply disability analyses to established terms and archives, and discuss accessibility issues for disabled historians. The resulting volume announces a disability history of science.

The contributors to Captivating Technology examine how carceral technologies such as electronic ankle monitors and predictive-policing algorithms are being deployed to classify and coerce specific populations and whether these innovations can be appropriated and reimagined for more liberatory ends.

This book is open access and available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. It is funded by Knowledge Unlatched. Winner of the 2020 British Society for Literature and Science book prize. In this important interdisciplinary study, Josie Gill explores how the contemporary novel has drawn upon, and intervened in, debates about race in late 20th and 21st century genetic science. Reading works by leading contemporary writers including Zadie Smith, Kazuo Ishiguro, Octavia Butler and Colson Whitehead, Biofictions demonstrates how ideas of race are produced at the intersection of science and fiction, which together create the stories about identity, racism, ancestry and kinship which characterize our understanding of race today. By highlighting the role of narrative in the formation of racial ideas in science, this book calls into question the apparent anti-racism of contemporary genetics, which functions narratively, rather than factually or objectively, within the racialized contexts in which it is embedded. In so doing, Biofictions compels us to rethink the long-asked question of whether race is a biological fact or a fiction, calling instead for a new understanding of the relationship between race, science and fiction.

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving and diverse field of anthropological studies of technology. It features 39 original chapters, each reviewing the state of the art of current research and enlivening the field of study through ethnographic analysis of human-technology interfaces, forms of social organisation, technological practices and/or systems of belief and meaning in different parts of the world. The Handbook is organised around some of the most important characteristics of anthropological studies of technology today: the diverse knowledge practices that technologies involve and on which they depend; the communities, collectives, and categories that emerge around technologies; anthropology’s contribution to proliferating debates on ethics, values, and morality in relation to technology; and infrastructures that highlight how all technologies are embedded in broader political economies and socio-historical processes that shape and often reinforce inequality and discrimination while also generating diversity. All chapters share a commitment to human experiences, embodiments, practices, and materialities in the daily lives of those people and institutions involved in the development, manufacturing, deployment, and/or use of particular technologies. Chapters 11 and 31 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.