Concussion killjoys: CTE, violence and the brain’s becoming

Front. Sports Act. Living

2021

The death of American Football player Mike Webster has become foundational to narratives of sport's twenty-first century concussion crisis. Bennet Omalu, the neuropathologist who conducted Webster's autopsy and subsequently diagnosed Webster with Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), has, likewise, become a central figure in the concussion crisis. Indeed, it is frequently argued that there is something about Omalu in particular that made it possible for him to “witness” CTE when the disease entity had hitherto remained invisible to a great many medics and scientists. In this article, and drawing upon auto/biographies, I consider Omalu's self-described mode of scientific witnessing which purportedly allowed him to (re)discover CTE. I find Omalu's described objectivity to be shaped by three factors: First, the importance of “trained judgment” within which Omalu's scientific training is emphasized. Second, the infusion of religiosity within scientific practice. Third, a self-described position as an “outsider” to both football and American culture. Throughout this analysis, I pay attention not only to the ways in which Omalu's narratives depart from conventional depictions of scientific objectivity; I also note the similarities with particular bodies of social scientific work, most notably within a feminist “turn to care” in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and related standpoint epistemologies. Following these analyses, I argue that, first, Omalu's writing affords the dead a “response-ability” that is often absent within analyses of the concussion crisis and, second, that a focus upon diverse forms of objectivity, such as those described in Omalu's work, complements existing work into concussion science that has foregrounded scientific conflict of interest.

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 81%

Section: Introduction: When Omalu Met Webstermentioning

confidence: 99%

“Learning to Listen to Them and Ask the Right Questions.” Bennet Omalu, Scientific Objectivities, and the Witnessing of a Concussion Crisis

Front. Sports Act. Living

2021

“…Starring Will Smith as Omalu; David Morse as Webster; and Alec Baldwin as Julian Bailes, a well-known neurosurgeon and former doctor to the Pittsburgh Steelers, Concussion is a fictionalized retelling of the story underpinning the introduction this essay – Omalu’s (re)discovery of CTE. The film occupies a central place in ongoing discourse about CTE: It has prompted articles in The Lancet Neurology ( Smith and Stewart, 2016 ), while social scientists have argued that it has ‘solidified star status for the fragile brain’ ( Martin and McMillan, 2020 : 2). Alongside League of Denial , the film is understood as one of the ‘key media texts’ to have ‘crucially shaped’ the ‘underlying tone of media coverage about CTE’ ( Ventresca, 2019 : 143).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Consider the woodpecker: The contested more-than-human ethics of biomimetic technology and traumatic brain injury

2021

Soc Stud Sci

Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, is a neurodegenerative disease caused by traumatic brain injury and most frequently associated with contact sports such as American Football. Perhaps surprisingly, the woodpecker – an animal apparently immune to the effects of head impacts – has increasingly figured into debates surrounding CTE. On the one hand, the woodpecker is described as being contra-human and used to underscore the radical inappropriateness of humans playing football. On the other, there have been attempts to mitigate against the risk of CTE through the creation of biomimetic technologies inspired by woodpeckers. In this article I examine the highly politicized encounters between humans and woodpeckers and discuss how the politics of re-/dis-/en-tanglement during these interspecies relations is rendered meaningful. I show here, first, that those who seek to keep the human and the woodpecker apart envisage social overhaul while biomimetic technologies are put to work for the status quo. Second, I stress that different forms of entanglement have diverse sociopolitical consequences. I conclude by suggesting that the case of the woodpecker troubles a strand of contemporary scholarship in Science and Technology Studies that argues that biotechnologies are inherently transformatory and that foregrounding entanglement and interspecies relations is ethically generative. Instead, a discursive separation of nature and culture may be innovative.

“…Increasingly, though, I deem my sociological will‐to‐reflexivity as inadequate. Am I not complicit in perpetuating—and for the same mundane, methodological reasons—the heteronormative and potentially performative effects of research that continues to construct CTE as a problem that, first, overwhelmingly affects men and, second, locates women in the discussion primarily as caregivers to afflicted partners (Martin & McMillan, 2020)? Does this not demand redress, and not just reflexivity?…”

Section: Approaching Complicitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Complicity: Methodologies of power, politics and the ethics of knowledge production

Sociology Health & Illness

Williams

2022

In this collection we develop the concept of “complicity” as a means to understand how medical sociologists might be allied in unexpected or uncomfortable ways with dominant structures of power. After giving examples of complicity from our own research, we introduce existing scholarship on complicity, describing it as a concept that comes coupled with a sense of responsibility and that is related to, yet distinct from, a range of other terms including reflexivity, collusion, guilt, and shame. We also discuss how complicity has been described to occur at the level of the institution, within theoretical frameworks, and during mundane moments that we face on a day‐to‐day basis. Building on this review, we hypothesise that medical sociology – where access to fieldsites is often hard won, where “researching up” in medical and scientific institutions is common, and where our own work frequently concerns matters central to medical institutions themselves – is a discipline wherein mundane complicity is likely. Following this gathering exercise, we introduce the interventions that comprise this collection: interventions from a diversity of sociologists of health and illness who, perhaps for the first time in written form, account for how complicities of various kinds came to shape their work and how, with varying levels of success, they have sought redress. We close by offering some insight into the process of developing this collection, celebrating its successes while also acknowledging that many gaps and complicities remain.