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

在过去的30年里，医疗实践经历了深刻的技术变革。在这一时期出现的成像技术，如MRI，正在将医学的视野转移到一个领域，在这个领域中，身体似乎已经失去了其物质性，成为一种视觉媒介（Balsamo 1996）。除了提供巨大的诊断可能性外，MRI等医学成像技术还从根本上重新配置人体，并为个人和社会自我的新表达做出贡献。本论文研究补助金试图通过分析MRI发展的社会经济和技术背景，将这种新的视觉化置于语境中。 这项研究有两个目的。首先，通过比较跨文化研究，突出有助于这种新的数字化可见性的社会/文化因素，该项目将试图揭示社会技术网络，其中MRI等技术的可视化位于并继续发展。 此外，该项目将试图展示这种基于计算机的可视化在当今全球化时代以何种方式重新绘制不同社会的空间和身体。其次，MRI研究自20世纪70年代诞生以来，一直处于不同学科、机构和国家的交界处。随着信息/通信技术的发展，跨国合作进一步加速。然而，这些合作并不是信息和技术的畅通无阻的流动。它们植根于国家、教育/研究机构、跨国公司和个人的社会、政治和经济利益之中。本研究试图以磁共振成像为个案，探讨非西方国家与西方国家在尖端技术发展中的互动与交流的本质。 该项目的资金支持两个实验室的研究，一个在美国，另一个在印度。在这些实验室进行的研究将需要通过参与者观察结合实验室工作的“详细描述”，并对科学家进行采访，对科学论文、政策文件、非专业文章、传记和自传笔记进行文本分析。

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.