Article ID: CBB084147277

Making Measuring Bodies (2023)

unapi

Medicine is often criticized in science and technology studies (STS) for its dominating measuring practices. To date, the focus has been on two areas of “metric work”: health-care workers and metric infrastructures. In this article, I step back into the training of clinicians, which is important for understanding more about how practices of measurement are developed. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch medical school to look at how a ubiquitous and mundane tool––measuring tapes––is embodied by medical students as they learn to coordinate their sensory knowledge. In doing so, they create their own bodies as the standard or measure of things. Unpacking educational practices concerning this object, I suggest that tracing the making of measuring bodies offers new insights into medical metric work. This also speaks to the growing interest in STS in sensory science, where the body is fashioned as a measuring instrument. Specifically, two interrelated contributions build on and deepen STS scholarship: first, the article shows that learning is an embodied process of inner-scaffold making; second, it suggests that the numerical objectification of sensory knowing is not a calibration to “objectivity machines” but rather to oscillations between bodies and objects that involve sensory-numerical work.

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Authors & Contributors
Hillman, Alexandra
Atkinson, Paul
Boniolo, Giovanni
Glasner, Peter
Kim, Hyomin
Choon Key Chekar
Journals
Social Studies of Science
Science, Technology, and Human Values
East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal
Transfers
Medicina nei Secoli - Arte e Scienza
Science as Culture
Publishers
Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana
Concepts
Science and technology studies (STS)
Medicine
Ethnography
Medicine and society
Medical education and teaching
Embodiment; corporeality
People
Heidegger, Martin
Auster, Paul
Time Periods
21st century
20th century, late
Places
Great Britain
Mexico
Africa
India
Taiwan
China
Institutions
UK Stem Cell Bank
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