current projects
Body, politic: Sex, TEchnology and the State
Access to two technological interventions is expanding: post-partum Medicaid recipients have greater access to long-acting reversible contraceptives, and men convicted of sexual violence have greater access to surgical and chemical castration. These technologies and their users are superficially discrete but (bio)politically linked through their scripted meanings and social consequences – the user is given a choice, but the choice is prescribed and gives the state control. The central question of the book: how have technologies scripted with meanings of empowerment become implicated in programs, policies, practices that restrict freedom, discipline bodies, limit life chances?
Responsible innovation in The PRivate Sector
Responsible Innovation (RI) is a roughly two-decade old concept that attempts to answer the question, “How should we innovate?” rather than the question, “How can we innovate?” Answering this “should” question is crucial for several reasons, perhaps most notably that technologies structure our society in many ways, akin to the way that laws do, and yet people (in democracies) who might have a variety of ways of participating in the creation of those laws have very few ways to participate in the making of new technologies. An ethic or commitment to RI is one way to imagine making up for this shortcoming. RI can help provide guidance to assure that emerging technologies maximize the opportunity for broad public benefit and minimize the potential for harm – and not simply repeat or reproduce some of the failures of past innovations.
Epidermal thinking and the politics of sunscreen
Sunscreen raises sometimes conflicting discourses of healthism, of responsibilization narratives in medicine, of racialization and racism and privilege more broadly. Like most technologies, sunscreen is about (mostly unrealized) hopes and promises — the promise of better health, the hope of eternal youthfulness, the promise of safety and security, the hope that we will be protected from unseen and unknown future harms. Like many technologies, it is also about malleability, change, uncertainty, and our relations to one another. Sunscreen is both a shield and a mask. It isn’t enough and it is deceptively powerful.
Publications
Grzanka, P., Brian, J. and R. Bhatia. “Intersectionality and STS.” Science, Technology and Human Values; forthcoming.
Brian, J., Grzanka, P., and E. Mann. “The Age of LARC: Making Sexual Citizens on the Frontiers of Technoscientific Healthism.” Health Sociology Review 2020; DOI: 10.1080/14461242.2020.1784018.
Grzanka, P., and Brian, J. “Clinical Encounters: The Social Justice Question in Intersectional Medicine.” American Journal of Bioethics 2019; 19(2): 22-24.
Brian, J. and R. Cook-Deegan. “What’s the Use? Disparate purposes of US federal bioethics commissions.” Hastings Center Report 2017.
Grzanka, P., Brian, J. and Shim, J. “My Bioethics Will Be Intersectional or It Will Be [Bleep].”American Journal of Bioethics 2016; 16 (4): 27-29.
Brian, J. (Editor). Special perspectives section: “Responsible research and innovation for synthetic biology.” Journal of Responsible Innovation 2015; 2 (1): 78-100.
Ingram-Waters, M., Brian, J., and Cole, N.L. “Critiquing Culture from the Sidelines: A conversation on football, cultural critique, ethics and collective action.” Culture in Conversation, February 2014.
Brian, J., and Grzanka, P. “The Machine in the Garden of Desire.” American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 2014; 5(1): 17-18.
Brian, J., and Briggle, A. “Bioethics and politics: Rules of engagement.” American Journal of Bioethics 2009; 9(2): 59-61.
Herder, M. and Dyck Brian, J. “Canada’s Stem Cell Corporation: Aggregate Concerns and the Question of Public Trust.” Journal of Business Ethics 2008; 77(1): 73-84.
Brian, J. “Review – Current Controversies in the Biological Sciences.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 2008; 83(4): 386.
Brian, J. and Robert, J. “Review – Liberation Biology.” Theoretical Medicine and Biology 2008; 29(2): 125-128.
Randal, AE. (Published under pseudonym.) “The personal and interpersonal issues of egg donation.” Journal of Obstetrics and Gynaecology Canada 2004; 26(12): 1087-1090.
Dyck, J. “The Quest for a Peculiar Happiness.” Ethics and Behavior 2004; 14(1): 99-101.