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Lesley Sharp – professor of anthropology at Barnard College and senior research scientist at Mailman School of Public Health at Columbia University — wants you to think twice (or maybe more) about how badly you really want that second body.
When: Wednesday November 7 7:30 PM
Where: Butler University, Atherton Union Reilly Room.

Part of Butler’s J. James Woods Lectures in the Sciences and Mathematics
Free and open to the public. For more information, call (317) 940-9861.

A well-known medical anthropologist and ethnographer of Madagascar, Lesley Sharp has most recently published two major volumes on the culture and ethics of organ transplants: Bodies, Commodities, and Biotechnologies: Death, Mourning, and Scientific Desire in the Realm of Human Organ Transfer and Strange Harvest: Organ Transplants, Denatured Bodies, and the Transformed Self. She will speak about artificial forms of body replacement and how physicians and patients think about them. She describes her research trajectory:

As medical anthropologist by training, I am most concerned with critical analyses of the symbolics of the human body, where my research sites range from cosmopolitan medical centers within the United States to urban centers in sub-Saharan Africa. From 1986 until 1995, my work as an Africanist was based in a polycultural plantation community of northwest Madagascar, where initial research addressed spirit mediumship and the gendered nature of healing… I later returned to the same site in the mid-1990s to examine other forms of affliction, most notably the effects of the State’s short-lived socialist project in shaping the historical and political consciousness of Malagasy school youth…. Beginning in 1991 (and extending to the present) I have also been engaged in research on organ transplantation, procurement, and donation in the United States. Key foci include medical ideologies, body commodification, and the transformative properties of organ transplants specifically in reference to the social construction of the self…. My current research explores the nature of the scientific imagination specifically in reference to experimental efforts to develop replacement organs of non-human origin, ranging from those culled from genetically altered swine to mechanical prototypes and organs grown from cell cultures.

You can hear Lesley Sharp deliver a talk on bodies, commodities, and biotechnology, or read an excerpt from her book.

This grappling with science and values sounds fascinating. If you want more, check out the Center for Inquiry Indiana’s conference on “Promoting Science and Reason at the Crossroads of America” September 23, or the DePauw Discourse on Sustainability and Global Citizenship October 4-6, or the discussion of global warming, religion and science November 12.

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This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 1:51 am and is filed under Events, Health & Medicine, Technology, Science, Business, Africa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.