Technology & Personhood: Neonatal Medicine and New Ways of Coming into Being

Biomedical sciences - especially machinery and expertise to sustain or engineer life itself - bring substantial benefits to humankind, yet also bring forth unprecedented questions and challenges to conventional logical and moral orders. By shifting the (historically-situated) nature/culture dialectic in ways that change the parameters of human existence, biomedicine fundamentally changes human agency, subjectivity, relationships and worldviews. It can be argued that under certain conditions biomedical technologies and practices introduce new forms of personhood, and thereby play a direct role in altering the contemporary (Western) category of the `person`. This project studies one such technologically-driven circumstance: the historical and conceptual `birth` of the `preterm baby`. Through the equipments and expertise of neonatal/perinatal medicine, the preterm baby `comes into existence`, not only as a unique biological creature: but as a technological invention, a politico-legal entity, a kinship actor, and a medical patient. Three spheres of influence are under study: 1) the sphere of the medical establishment, including herein the contexts of clinical care and basic research as well as equipment engineering and manufacturing; 2) the sphere of the patients` (non-medical) support community, including the interpersonal contexts of patients` families, as well as solidarity networks and Internet-based patient advocacy movements; 3) the sphere of governance, including healthcare policy and the societal management of the preterm baby, as well as the conceptual enculturation of the preterm baby into everyday worldviews and localities. In charting the co-evolution of technology and personhood, this project embraces two complementary research objectives. One takes a meta-perspective to explore the values and logic in action that are restructuring normative understandings of personhood in contemporary Western society. The complementary objective takes a more applied orientation, in seeking to understand how new concepts of personhood which initially derive from the challenges triggered by biomedical technologies, in turn, come to inform back upon practices within medical care. Combined, these objectives involve exploring how the preterm baby is accorded agency and identity by healthcare providers, and what this means for treatment and for hospital teamwork. They also involve exploring how the preterm baby becomes assimilated as a kinship member into parents` lifeworlds, and what this means in terms of strategies to forge formative bonds with newborns and to forge identities as parents. They further include exploring how the preterm baby is brought into existence through Internet online exchanges, and what this means with respect to the emergence of alternative narratives of motherhood (and fatherhood) that are collectively re-defining conventional notions of maternity (and paternity). Analyses pay particular attention to the ethical and epistemic formulations and implications for healthcare services, for patients and their families, and for society at-large.