Marisa Brandt

Michigan State University, Lyman Briggs College, Faculty Member

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The Ultimate Medium for People with Disabilities?

Routledge eBooks, Dec 2, 2022

Simulated War: Remediating Trauma Narratives in Military Psychotherapy

Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, 2016

How have the politics of therapy been reconfigured during the so-called Global War on Terror? Wh... more How have the politics of therapy been reconfigured during the so-called Global War on Terror? What role have the new virtual reality therapies that so resemble other forms of military simulation played in this reconfiguration? In this article, I draw upon feminist science and technology’s (STS) theorization of human-machine interaction into order to interrogate how contemporary therapies for treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) reconfigure agency in the practice of healing. Analyzing trauma therapy as a site of reconfiguration, I show how new exposure-based therapies for PTSD—both with and without virtual reality—configure aspects of human subjectivity, such as memory, affect, and behavior, as objects for technological intervention. Through comparative analysis of different modalities of PTSD treatment, I show that the politics of therapy is especially enacted through the therapeutic remediation of trauma narratives: the mediational practices through which a traumatic me...

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Health and the Public Sphere: The Politicization of Health Reporting, 1960s-2000s

Cyborg Agency and Individual Trauma: What Ender's Game Teaches Us about Killing in the Age of Drone Warfare

M/C Journal, 2013

During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of ... more During the War on Terror, the United States military has been conducting an increasing number of foreign campaigns by remote control using drones—also called unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) or remotely piloted vehicles (RPVs)—to extend the reach of military power and augment the technical precision of targeted strikes while minimizing bodily risk to American combatants. Stationed on bases throughout the southwest, operators fly weaponized drones over the Middle East. Viewing the battle zone through a computer screen that presents them with imagery captured from a drone-mounted camera, these combatants participate in war from a safe distance via an interface that resembles a video game. Increasingly, this participation takes the form of targeted killing. Despite their relative physical safety, in 2008 reports began mounting that like boots-on-the-ground combatants, many drone operators seek the services of chaplains or other mental health professionals to deal with the emotional toll...

Online comments about psychiatric neurosurgery and psychopharmacological interventions: Public perceptions and concerns

Social Science & Medicine, 2018

The field of biological psychiatry is controversial, with both academics and members of the publi... more The field of biological psychiatry is controversial, with both academics and members of the public questioning the validity and the responsible use of psychiatric technological interventions. The field of neuroethics provides insight into these controversies by examining key themes that characterize specific topics, attitudes, and reasoning tools that people use to evaluate interventions in the brain and mind. This study offers new empirical neuroethical insights into how the public responds to the use and development of psychiatric technological interventions by comparing how the public evaluates pharmacological and neurosurgical psychiatric interventions, in the context of online comments on news media articles about these topics. We analyzed 1142 comments from 108 articles dealing with psychopharmacological and psychiatric neurosurgery interventions on websites of major circulation USA newspapers and magazines published between 2005 and 2015. Personal anecdote, medical professional issues, medicalization, social issues, disadvantages, scientific issues and cautionary realism were among the main themes raised by commenters. The insights derived from the comments can contribute to improving communication between professionals and the public as well as to incorporating the public's views in policy decisions about psychiatric interventions.

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Comparison of philosophical concerns between professionals and the public regarding two psychiatric treatments

AJOB Empirical Bioethics, 2018

Background: Psychiatric interventions are a contested area in medicine, not only because of their... more Background: Psychiatric interventions are a contested area in medicine, not only because of their history of abuses, but also because their therapeutic goal is to affect emotions, thoughts, beliefs, and behaviors that are regarded as pathological. Because psychiatric interventions affect characteristics that seem central to who we are, they raise issues regarding identity, autonomy, and personal responsibility for one's own well-being. Our study addresses two questions: (1) Do the public and academic researchers understand the philosophical stakes of these technologies in the same way? Following from this, (2) to what extent does the specific type of psychiatric technology affect the issues these two groups raise? This study compares how ethical issues regarding neurosurgical and pharmaceutical psychiatric interventions are discussed among the public and in the professional community of academic medicine and bioethics. Methods: We analyzed (1) online public comments and (2) the medical and bioethics literature, comparing the discussions of pharmacological and neurosurgical interventions in psychiatry in each source. Results: Overall, the public discussed philosophical issues less frequently than academics. For the two types of psychiatric interventions, we found differences between the academic literature and public comments among all themes, except for personal responsibility. Conclusions: These findings reveal some of the similarities and discrepancies in how philosophical issues associated with psychiatric treatments are discussed in professional circles and among the public. Further research into what causes these discrepancies is crucial.

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Hawking: The man and the corporationHawking Incorporated: Stephen Hawking and the Anthropology of the Knowing Subject. MialetHélene (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL, 2012). Pp. 266. $31.00 (paperback). ISBN 9780226522289

Journal for the History of Astronomy, 2015

War, Trauma, and Technologies of the Self : : The Making of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

All truly large-scale projects are to some extent a work of distributed cognition, and this disse... more All truly large-scale projects are to some extent a work of distributed cognition, and this dissertation is no exception. First and above all I thank my advisor, Chandra Mukerji, not only for generously reading draft after draft and giving valuable feedback, but also for never letting me give up. You truly taught me about living as a professional scholar in a way that I hope to emulate. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my other advisors: David Serlin, who generously provided detailed feedback and ongoing support on this project; Kelly Gates, who gave me the opportunity to publish an early chapter on this work. Charlie Thorpe, who believed in me as a teacher and junior colleague. Joseph Dumit, whose long Skype conversations always gave me a new way of seeing and who, by organizing the annual Cal.STS retreat, gave me the single event where I have felt the most at home in an intellectual family. My other scholars have also provided mentorship throughout this project. Thank you to Morana Alac, who first recognized this project as dissertation-worthy; Val Hartouni, who first directed my attention to military PTSD; Andy Lakoff, who introduced me to the science studies literature on trauma; Carol Padden and Elana Zilberg, who each helped me develop a voice in ethnographic writing. Thank you also to my mentors Fred

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Biomedicalization and the public sphere: Newspaper coverage of health and medicine, 1960s–2000s

Social Science & Medicine, 2013

This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health, illness and medicine in UK an... more This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health, illness and medicine in UK and Italian newspapers from 1984 to 2017. It focuses on the increasing "biomedicalization" of health reporting and the framing of health and medicine as a matter of technoscientific interventions. Methodologically, we relied on two large datasets consisting of all the health-and medicine-related articles published in the online archives of The Guardian (UK) and la Repubblica (Italy). These articles underwent a quantitative analysis, based on topic modelling techniques, to identify and analyse relevant topics in the datasets. Moreover, we developed some synthetic indices to support the analysis of how medical and health news are "biomedicalized" in media coverage. Theoretically, we emphasise that media represent a constitutive environment in shaping biomedicalization processes. Our analyses show that across the period under scrutiny, biomedicalization is a relevant, even if sometimes ambivalent, frame in the media sphere, placing growing centrality on three dimensions: i) health and well-being as a matter of individual commitment to self-monitoring and self-surveillance; ii) biomedicine as a large technoscientific enterprise emerging from the entanglement between research fields and their technological embodiments; iii) the multiverse reforms of welfare systems in facing the trade-off between universal health coverage and the need to render the national healthcare system more sustainable and compatible with non-expansionary monetary policies and austerity approaches in managing state government budgets.

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Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America

History of Photography, 2012

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Zapatista corn: A case study in biocultural innovation

Social Studies of Science, 2014

In November 2001, Nature published a letter in which University of California Berkeley’s biologis... more In November 2001, Nature published a letter in which University of California Berkeley’s biologists claimed to have found evidence of genetically modified (GM) DNA in regional varieties of maize in Oaxaca, even though the Mexican government had banned transgenic corn agriculture in 1998. While urban protesters marched against the genetic ‘contamination’ of Mexican corn by US-based agricultural biotech firms, rural indigenous communities needed a framework for understanding concepts such as GM before they could take action. This article analyzes how the indigenous organization, the Zapatistas, mobilized a program to address this novel entity. Their anti-GM project entailed educating local farmers about genetics, importing genetic testing kits, seed-banking landrace corn and sending seeds to ‘solidarity growers’ around the world. This article explores material-semiotic translations to explain one of the central aspects of this project, the definition and circulation of Zapatista corn ...

From “The Ultimate Display” to “The Ultimate Skinner Box”

The International Encyclopedia of Media Studies, 2012

Wireless Worlds: Subject–Object Relations in the Twenty-first Century

Science as Culture, 2013

War, Trauma, & Technologies of the Self: The Making of Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy

Zapatista corn: A case study in biocultural innovation

“Cyborg Agency and Individual Trauma: What Ender’s Game Teaches us About Killing in the Age of Drone Warfare” Media/Culture, 16.6

Biomedicalization and the public sphere: Newspaper coverage of health and medicine, 1960s–2000s

This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health and medicine in The New York T... more This article examines historical trends in the reporting of health and medicine in The New York Times and Chicago Tribune from the 1960s to the 2000s. It focuses on the extent to which health reporting can be said to have become increasingly politicized, or to have shifted from treating the production of medical knowledge as something belonging to a restricted, specialized sphere, to treating it as a part of the general arena of public debate. We coded a sample of 400 stories from the two newspapers for four different Implied Audiences which health stories can address: Scientific/Professional, Patient/Consumer, Investor and Citizen/Policymaker. Stories were also coded for the origin of the story, the sources cited, the presence of controversy, and the positive or negative representation of biomedical institutions and actors. The data show that through all five decades, news reporting on health and medicine addressed readers as Citizen/Policymakers most often, though Patient/Consumer and Investor-oriented stories increased over time. Biomedical researchers eclipsed individual physicians and public health officials as sources of news, and the sources diversified to include more business sources, civil society organizations and patients and other lay people. The reporting of controversy increased, and portrayals of biomedicine shifted from lopsidedly positive to more mixed. We use these data in pinpointing how media play a constitutive role in the process of “biomedicalization,” through which biomedicine has both extended its reach into and become entangled with other spheres of society and of knowledge production.

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“From the Ultimate Display to the Ultimate Skinner Box: Virtual Reality and the Future of Psychotherapy.” In Kelly Gates (ed), International Encyclopedia of Media Studies Vol. 6: Media Studies Futures. London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 518–539.

“Interview with Joy V. Fuqua, Prescription TV: Therapeutic Discourse in the Hospital and the Home.” Books Aren’t Dead. Fembot Collective.

“Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in 19th-Century America by Tanya Sheehan.” Technology & Culture, 54:3, 666–669.

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