Seminar Announcement
You are cordially invited to a seminar on visual imaging and medical
care in present-day Cambodia.
Date and Time: February 10th, 2023 16:00 to 17:30
Place: Tonantei, (2nd floor Inamori Memorial Foundation Building) and
ONLINE at the following URL
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89229563436?pwd=M2U5UFhlWmZPb29ncmd2OU9kYVVjQT09
Title: Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in Phnom
Penh
Speaker: Jenna Grant (University of Washington)
Abstract :
In Fixing the Image Jenna Grant theorizes the force and appeal of
medical imaging, particularly ultrasound, in the rapidly
changing urban landscape of Phnom Penh. Introduced around 1990, at the
twilight of socialism and after two decades of
conflict and upheaval, ultrasound took root in humanitarian and then
privatized medicine, offering the promise of diagnostic
information and better prenatal and general health care. Drawing from
years of ethnographic fieldwork and archival
research, Grant shows how the generative appeal of the mechanized
medical image connects to associations of technology
with the modernity of the postcolonial nation, the authority of skilled
vision in medicine and Theravada Buddhism,
and the economics of health care in Cambodia’s present-day authoritarian
capitalism. Set within the new abundance of
image-making technologies and new aesthetic possibilities, ultrasound
offers stabilizing knowledge and elicits desire
and pleasure, particularly for pregnant women. Grant off ers the concept
of “fi xing”– which
invokes repair, stabilization,
and a dose of something to which one is addicted—to illuminate how
ultrasound is entangled with practices of care and
neglect across diff erent domains. Fixing the Image, thus, provides a
method for studying technological practice in terms of
specifi c materialities and capacities of technologies—in this case,
image production and the permeability of the body—and
specifi cities of culture, history, and political economy in medicine.
About the speaker:
Jenna Grant is associate professor of anthropology and faculty at the
Southeast Asia Center at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA.
Grant's research questions, methods, and commitments extend in three
different directions: medical imaging and visual practices of health
care in Phnom Penh; Cambodia as a site of experimental global health
sciences; and experiments in collective care in Cambodia and the U.S.
Her book, Fixing the Image: Ultrasound and the Visuality of Care in
Phnom Penh (2022), was recently published by UW Press. Grant teaches
undergraduate and graduate courses about the anthropology of technology,
visuality and medicine, Southeast Asia, and sociocultural
