Hollin, G orcid.org/0000-0003-4348-8272 (2022) Consider the woodpecker: The contested more-than-human ethics of biomimetic technology and traumatic brain injury. Social Studies of Science, 52 (2). pp. 149-173. ISSN 0306-3127
Abstract
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease caused by traumatic brain injury and most frequently associated with contact sports such as American Football. Perhaps surprisingly, the woodpecker – an animal apparently immune to the effects of head impacts – has increasingly figured into debates surrounding CTE. On the one hand, the woodpecker is described as being contra-human and used to underscore the radical inappropriateness of humans playing football. On the other, there have been attempts to mitigate against the risk of CTE through the creation of biomimetic technologies inspired by woodpeckers. In this article I examine the highly politicized encounters between humans and woodpeckers and discuss how the politics of re-/dis-/en-tanglement during these interspecies relations is rendered meaningful. I show here, first, that those who seek to keep the human and the woodpecker apart envisage social overhaul while biomimetic technologies are put to work for the status quo. Second, I stress that different forms of entanglement have diverse sociopolitical consequences. I conclude by suggesting that the case of the woodpecker troubles a strand of contemporary scholarship in Science and Technology Studies that argues that biotechnologies are inherently transformatory and that foregrounding entanglement and interspecies relations is ethically generative. Instead, a discursive separation of nature and culture may be innovative.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © The Author(s) 2021. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). |
Keywords: | animal models; biomimicry; chronic traumatic encephalopathy; concussion; entanglement; epistemological scaffolding; sport |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of Leeds |
Academic Units: | The University of Leeds > Faculty of Education, Social Sciences and Law (Leeds) > School of Sociology and Social Policy (Leeds) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Wellcome Trust 212694/Z/18/Z |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Publications |
Date Deposited: | 01 Apr 2021 11:03 |
Last Modified: | 19 Mar 2023 03:31 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | SAGE Publications |
Identification Number: | 10.1177/03063127211052513 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:172742 |