Cynthia Schairer

Email Address: cschaire@ucsd.edu

Personal webpage: Cynthia Schairer

Education:

M.A. Sociology, UC San Diego

B.A. Sociology/Anthropology, Swarthmore College

Entered grad program in: 2004

Areas of Specialization: Science & Technology, Disability

Other Interests: Bioethics, Law & Society, Theory, Culture

Dissertation: “Everyday Prosthesis: Stories of Amputation, Technology, and Body”

Based on interviews with people who recently began using artificial limbs, this dissertation will explore how amputees come to interpret their bodies and prosthetic limbs and how these interpretations reflect or reinvent popular thinking about the body. The project will examine how a medical procedure and assistive technology can influence ideas about the body and the self and how these ideas inform current approaches to disability and the meaning of being human. With these findings, I also hope to critique and elaborate on theories of technology and modernity that depend on prosthesis as a metaphor for human relations with technology.

 

Mailing Address:
University of California, San Diego
Department of Sociology
9500 Gilman Dr. - 0533
La Jolla, CA 92093-0533