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3 books match the query 'Flux'

cover of Bodies in Flux: Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty

Bodies in Flux

Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty

Christa Teston

University of Chicago Press, 2017

Doctors, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of “certainty” in medical practice. To help navigate the chaos caused by ongoing bodily change we rely on scientific reductions and deductions. We take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. Particularly in cancer care, processes deep within our bodies are at work long before we even know where to look. In the face of constant biological and technological change, how do medical professionals ultimately make decisions about care?

Bodies in Flux explores the inventive ways humans and nonhumans work together to manufacture medical evidence. Each chapter draws on rhetorical theory to investigate a specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. Case studies unveil how doctors rely on visuals when deliberating about a patient’s treatment options, how members of the FDA use inferential statistics to predict a drug’s effectiveness, how researchers synthesize hundreds of clinical trials into a single evidence-based recommendation, and how genetic testing companies compute and commoditize human health. Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that pushes back against the fetishization of certainty—an ethic of care that honors human fragility and bodily flux.
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cover of Contemporary Opera in Flux

Contemporary Opera in Flux

Edited by Yayoi U. Everett

University of Michigan Press, 2024

In twelve essays, Contemporary Opera in Flux discusses a series of shifts that, taken together, have radically redefined the production and reception of opera. Focusing on productions involving late twentieth- and twenty-first century scores and libretti, the contributors draw on conversations with members of creative teams and studies of archival material, dipping into a historical record that remains in flux as composers, librettists, directors, and designers revisit existing work and create anew. The contributors to this volume push the boundaries of contemporary opera scholarship by examining works that disrupt operatic conventions; tackle sociopolitical issues such as drug trafficking, racial injustice, and cultural trauma; and advance underrepresented works by female, African-American, Asian, and avant-garde composers around the globe. 

Contemporary Opera in Flux bridges the gaps between expanding literature on opera, theater, new music, postmodern dramaturgy, and posthuman aesthetics, while also confronting larger questions of identity, representation, and narrative agency that are at the forefront of contemporary music scholarship. This collection of essays engages critically with the past out of a conviction that, amid general public perceptions of opera as anachronistic or elitist, contemporary opera has emerged as an artistic incubator for experimentation.
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cover of Stream: Living in Flux

Stream

Living in Flux

Callum Angus

Northwestern University Press, 2027

A nonfiction work examining a confluence of bodily and worldwide transition

Stream is an exploration of the large- and small-scale changes taking place in a single body and on our planet as a whole. Using a stream as a biological, technological, and psychological metaphor, Angus layers lyric essay, journal entries, and the detritus of a life spent writing about the climate within and without to consider how we remain fluid in a time of constant change. Each section of Stream flows into the next, weaving through thaws, floods, cataracts, and eddies while asking how a melting of rigid categories, from seasons to gender, might help us approach a changing world anew. From winery workers dying in the fields to endangered desert tortoises unable to outrun the flames, Stream is an outpouring of climatological grief toward those who perpetuate inaction, an elegy for those we’ve lost to the heat, and a tribute to the tributaries that help us see the world from other perspectives.

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