Liminality, Biomedicine, and the Law – A symposium supported by the wellcome trust
Biomedicine and the life sciences continue to rearrange the relationship between culture and biology, problematizing what it means to be […]
Samuel Taylor-Alexander
Samuel Taylor-Alexander is Senior Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology at the School of Law, University of Edinburgh. He wrote his PhD in Medical Anthropology at the ANU, exploring the coproduction of medicine in politics in Mexican reconstructive surgery. With increasing neoliberal reform and the strong place of modernity and development in the national imaginary, Mexico provided a unique stage for examining how the emergence of new forms of politically charged, experimental medical practice are related to global trends in medical provision.
Samuel examined these themes further with his first monograph On Face Transplantation: Life and Ethics in Experimental Biomedicine (Palgrave Macmillan 2014). Drawing together patient accounts, analysis of medical publication and interviews with surgeons and bureaucrats, this books demonstrates that what is being remade in the burgeoning medical field of face transplantation is not only the lives of patients, but also the very ways that state institutions, surgeons, and families make sense of rights, claims for inclusion, and life itself.
His current project is entitled Regulation in Action:Doing and Making Rare Diseases in the United Kingdom and explores both the entwined political and biomedical performance of rare diseases based on analysis of bureaucratic bodies, experimental research, and patient narratives.
Previous to joining the Masson Institute, Samuel was Professional Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and a Doctoral Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard University, the Kennedy School of Government.
His current project is entitled Regulation in Action:Doing and Making Rare Diseases in the United Kingdom and explores both the entwined political and biomedical performance of rare diseases based on analysis of bureaucratic bodies, experimental research, and patient narratives.
Previous to joining the Mason Institute, Samuel was Professional Teaching Fellow in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Auckland and a Doctoral Fellow in the Program on Science, Technology and Society at Harvard University, the Kennedy School of Government.