New paper published in special section of the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics

I’m excited to announce that my paper, “Building Intricate Partnerships with Neurotechnology: Deep Brain Stimulation and Relational Agency,” was just published in the International Journal of Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. This article makes up one part of a special section on feminist neurotechnologies edited by Drs. Sara Goering and Laura Specker-Sullivan.

Check out the abstract below:

Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) is an FDA-approved treatment for symptoms of motor disorders—with experimental use for psychiatric disorders. DBS, however, causes a variety of side effects. Moral philosophers question DBS’s influence on users’ experiences of authenticity, identity, and/or autonomy. These characterizations of DBS, however, may not make sense of how DBS complicates, rather than simply impedes or bolsters, users’ abilities to exercise agency. Empirical work exploring DBS users’ lived-experiences and feminist accounts of relational autonomy demonstrate that the issues users face are better characterized in terms of the user’s relationship to their stimulator, that is, in terms of “relational agency.”