Doctoral Dissertation Research: Intimate Sharing: The Enduring Connections of Living Organ Donation in the Contemporary United States

The New School, New York NY

Investigators

Abstract

Introduction This research project is an ethnographic study of living organ transfer as a potent site where Americans grapple with challenges to fundamental Euro-American liberal assumptions about bodies and persons. It brings perspectives from studies of science and technology that are highly attentive to materiality and the shifting ontological status of objects. Intellectual Merit In contrast to previous studies? disinterest in organs themselves, this research emphasizes sharing as a way to attend not only to the value of organs and tissues as they move and regenerate, but also to how their very materiality is enacted and circumscribed through particular configurations of knowledge, practices, and relationships. The fieldwork is thus driven by two interrelated objectives. The first is to explore when and how living organ transfer is understood through the analytic of sharing, staying equally attentive to situations in which sharing is not expressed, namely when "mine" and "yours" are emphasized and understood as being mutually exclusive. The second is to explore the ways in which transplanted organs and transplant-modified bodies are rendered material and agentive in particular ways that shape and are shaped by attitudes toward organ ownership. Potential Broader Impacts Drawing on the experiences of enduring connectivity between living organ donors and recipients, the research proposes to revitalize sharing as an analytical concept. Elaborating this long ignored mode of possession promises to enrich ways of talking about property, exchange, and relationships by providing a term that emphasizes connection without assuming this connection to be necessarily founded in sameness, equality, or joy. The focus on sharing also stands to help living organ donors, recipients, and other interested parties give valid expression to experiences that contradict the "spare parts" and "gift of life" models that currently dominate transplant rhetoric.