Dissertation Research: Visualization and Representation in Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI): A Cross-Cultural Comparison of Scientific Research in the United States and India

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In the last thirty years medical practice has undergone a profound technological change. Imaging technologies like MRI that emerged in this period are shifting medicine's vision to a domain in which the body seems to have lost its materiality and become a visual medium (Balsamo 1996). Apart from offering vast diagnostic possibilities, medical imaging technologies like MRI are also radically reconfiguring the human body and contributing to new enunciations of individual and social selves. This dissertation research grant attempts to contextualize this new visuality by analyzing the socio-economic and technical contexts of the development of MRI. The study has two purposes. First, through a comparative cross-cultural study to highlight the social/cultural factors contributing to the making of this new digitalized visibility, the project will attempt to uncover the socio-technical network within which visualization by technologies like MRI is located and continues to develop. Further, the project will attempt to show in what ways this computer-based visualization is re-mapping spaces and bodies in different societies in the present era of globalization. Second, MRI research since its birth in the 1970s has been located at the interface of different disciplines, institutions, and nations. The transnational cooperation has been further accelerated with the recent development of information/communication technologies. Yet these cooperations are not unhindered flows of information and technology. They are embedded in the social, political, and economic interests of nations, education/research institutions, multinational companies, and individuals. This study seeks to use MRI as a case study to explore the nature of interaction and exchange of a non-western country with the west in the development of sophisticated technologies. Funding for this project supports research at two laboratories, one in the US and the other in India. The research at these laboratories will entail combining the "thick description" of the laboratory work through participant observation, and interviews of scientists with textual analysis of scientific papers, policy documents, lay articles, biographical, and autobiographical notes.