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2 books match the query 'Banner, Olivia'
Communicative Biocapitalism
The Voice of the Patient in Digital Health and the Health HumanitiesOlivia Banner
University of Michigan Press, 2017
The Precision Medicine Initiative, Apple’s HealthKit, the FitBit—the booming digital health industry asserts that digital networks, tools, and the scientific endeavors they support will usher in a new era of medicine centered around “the voice of the patient.” But whose “voices” do such tools actually solicit? And through what perspective will those voices be heard? Digital health tools are marketed as neutral devices made to help users take responsibility for their health. Yet digital technologies are not neutral; they are developed from an existing set of assumptions about their potential users and contexts for use, and they reflect dominant ideologies of health, dis/ability, gender, and race. Using patient-networking websites, the Quantified Self, and online breast cancer narratives, Communicative Biocapitalism examines the cultural, technological, economic, and rhetorical logics that shape the “voice of the patient” in digital health to identify how cultural understandings and social locations of race, gender, and disability shape whose voices are elicited and how they are interpreted.
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Crip Screens
Countering Psychiatric Media TechnologiesOlivia Banner
Duke University Press, 2025
In Crip Screens, Olivia Banner provides a wide-ranging and ongoing history of Black, feminist-of-color, and crip resistance to psychiatry’s incorporation of hegemonic media technologies into treatment and research. Banner shows how institutions use documentary films, data visualization, network graphs, therapy chatbots, virtual patient training programs, and pharmaceutical advertising to pathologize certain people as “deviant” and “mentally ill.” Those people so categorized have used media technologies toward alternative visions of care. Examining insurgent media and technology efforts in the 1960s and 1970s, Banner shows how women and communities of color worked to wrest away from psychiatry its hold over representing mental distress and pathological categorization. These efforts and innovations, she argues, were distinct from what is now accepted as the antipsychiatry movement. In so doing, Banner recovers a lost history of disability politics—what she calls crip screens—that refused psychiatry’s use of cultural productions toward its carceral and subjugating designs.
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