Deviant Bodies. Extended Bodies. When Motility Disability faces Enhancement in a Phenomenological Sociological Context

• Applicant: Privatdozentin Dr. Denisa Butnaru
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research ; Sociological Theory
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 401245801

The aim of the project is to analyze the construction and production of the "deviant" respectively of the "extended" body. The starting point of the inquiry is represented by the process in which bodily deviance changes from disability to enhancement, hence an "extended" body. In this transition, biotechnologies such as exoskeletons play a crucial role. This phenomenon shall be concretely considered with respect to cases in which motility is affected: persons having cerebral palsy (CP), spinal cord injury (SCI) and cerebrovascular accident (CVA). The goal is to produce a sociological analysis in which both theoretical as well as qualitative empirical material is used. To do so, the conceptual background of recent phenomenological theories of the body shall be used. The phenomenological theoretical frame shall be completed with recent debates in disability studies, sociology of the body and disability as well as debates in bioethics related to enhancement technologies. What shall be considered is precisely the ambivalence of the status of the own body qua "own" due to the application and use of exoskeletons and how this ambivalence contributes to the shift of bodily deviance from disability to enhancement. This shift shall be empirically analyzed in 1) narrative interviews of disabled persons having CP, SCI or having had CVA and having used exoskeletons, and narrative interviews of abled persons having used exoskeletons; expert interviews with engineers who design this type of biotechnologies and 2) ethnographic fieldwork. More precisely, the intention of the project is to show while contrasting these empirical data how the own body of disability is materially reformulated and transformed in an open laboratory, where not only corporeal normality is produced but also corporeal enhancement.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants