Nelly Oudshoorn 
Resilient Cyborgs [PDF ebook] 
Living and Dying with Pacemakers and Defibrillators

This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any ‘user’ agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating ‘resilient’ cyborgs.

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Part I Introduction: Theorizing the Resilience of Hybrid Bodies.- 1. Rematerializing the Cyborg: Understanding the Agency of People Living with Technologies inside Their Bodies.- 2. On Vulnerable Bodies, Transformative Technologies, and Resilient Cyborgs.- Part II Technogeographies of Resilience.- 3. Creating Material-Resilient Cyborgs: Sensing and Tuning Agencies of Pacemakers and Defibrillators.- 4. Passive Victims of Faulty Machines? Anticipating and Taming ICD Shocks.- 5. Wired-Heart Cyborgs and the Materiality of Everyday Life.- Part III Resilience and Difference.- 6. ‘How Did You Get that Scar?’: Gender and the Appropriation of Visibly Marked Bodies.- 7. How Age Matters: The Emotional Work of Younger and Older People Living with Defibrillators.- Part IV How Hybrid Bodies Fall Apart.- 8. “Should we turn off the pacemaker?”: Trajectories of Dying and Geographies of Rights and Responsibilities.- 9. The Second Life of Pacemakers: Creating Resilient Implants and Infrastructures for Pacemaker Reuse in the Global South.- 10. Conclusions: Towards a Sociology of Resilient Cyborgs.- Index.

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Nelly Oudshoorn is Professor Emerita of Technology Dynamics and Healthcare at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. She is the author of several award winning books on the development and use of new technologies in healthcare.