Between Self-Determination and Social Technology

The book critically examines how concepts such as self-determination, participation, ethics, or dialogue, developed not least by the feminist movement and directed against repression, heteronomy and professional paternalism, have been integrated into new contexts and transformed into new social technologies. Crossing a variety of fields from birthing, genetic counselling, living wills, hospital ethics, to population policies and politics of biomedicine, it shows that medicine and medicine-related policies and practices form crucial arenas of these transformations. What we see emerging is procedural management as a new set of social techniques. With a preface by William Ray Arney.

Kathrin Braun is professor (apl. Prof.) in Political Science at the University of Hanover (Germany) and an academic nomad whose work focuses on biopolitical modern rationality, its transformations and re-instantiations in past and present.