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<div align="center"><b>Please join us next Friday, January 28, for an STS
Brown Bag Lunch talk:<br><br>
<font size=4 color="#0000FF">MRI-visions: A high-tech trip into Swedish
health care, universities and bodies (1980-2000)<br><br>
</b></font>Speaker: Isabelle Dussauge, HSSST Visiting Graduate
Student<br><br>
12:00 noon, E51-191<br><br>
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Abstract:<br><br>
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is a complex medical imaging technology
introduced in most Western countries in the 1980s. By interrogating the
historical intersections of MRIs fieldsof reality: politics and economy,
materialdiffusion of technology and expansion of its user domain, ethical
debates and professional tensions, and ontologies of high-tech images, I
aim to understand the interrelatedness of these fields, and the problems
posed by attempting to grasp this complexity. <br><br>
Studying the history of MRI poses many challenges. The technology itself
is complex, based on a not always understood interaction between
radiofrequency signals and the physical chemistry and biology of the
body.. In Sweden, MRI became an object for debates as medical
high-technologies get politically problematized. It was introduced at a
time when an economic crisis in the welfare state led to a broad
rationalizing ambition, among others a political will to control medical
technologyall of this modelled on US experience of similar
issues. A new ethical discourse was also emerging that criticized
specifically the over-technification of medicine. <br><br>
At the same time, different professional groups worked on expanding what
I call MRIs visual field, i.e. the range of bodily phenomena and body
parts made <i>possibly visible</i> with MRI. However, these different
groups attributed fundamentally different meanings to MRI-technology, MRI
data, MR-images. Where physicists and chemists would seedata about
fundamental molecular processes in the body, radiologists and
psychiatrists would seemorphological (anatomic) information of clinical
value. But what did the public research funding agency see? And what
happened through the 1990s, as MRI became a more and more for-granted
part of Swedish health care, and as MRI enabled to seemore and more of
the body?<br><br>
During the session, I will outline these intertwined dimensions of the
history of MRI, and open a discussion on how its complexity may be
meaningfully approached, hoping for comments and suggestions on how this
project can be fruitfully continued.<br>
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Please feel free to bring your lunch; we will provide coffee and
dessert.<br>
<br><br>
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Kris Kipp<br>
Project Manager<br>
Program in Science, Technology, and Society<br>
Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br>
77 Mass. Ave., E51-185<br>
Cambridge, MA 02139<br>
Phone: 617-253-9759<br>
Fax: 617-258-8118<br>
Email: kipp@mit.edu</body>
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