Human Stories / Creative Solutions
As a scholar invested in understanding people and their lived experiences with health, technology, and culture, my research navigates the boundaries of various (inter)disciplines.
American Studies
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Science and Technology Studies
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History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
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Disability Studies / Crip Studies
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Medical Humanities / Health Studies
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Material Culture
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Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies
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American Studies ○ Science and Technology Studies ○ History of Science, Technology, and Medicine ○ Disability Studies / Crip Studies ○ Medical Humanities / Health Studies ○ Material Culture ○ Comparative Race and Ethnic Studies ○
Understanding human experiences requires the creation and innovation of methods, theories, epistemologies, and practices in order to do justice to those people and their worlds. Trained in critical analysis, archival and digital research methods, and qualitative research, I am devoted to finding a workable and ethical balance between taking texts, artifacts, and practices on their own terms, and applying critical analyses that will help frame how and why those terms exist and are expressed as they are.
Projects & Publications
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This chapter presents a narrative and visual analysis of Andrea Deck’s video “How I Hide My Insulin Pump.” Horrocks analyses Deck’s video as an example of YouTube videos devoted explicitly to “wearing” and “hiding” the insulin pump. Fashion(ing) emerges as a central practice in managing insulin therapy and reconstructing its social invisibility, allowing individuals back into the relative social safety of the visible normal. In his analysis, Horrocks argues that gendered cultural practices with insulin pumps simultaneously reinforce and resist “problematic visions of embodied normalcy.” He goes on to question how social standards of normalcy are reinforced through “biomedical intervention and US cultural representations of gender.”
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This dissertation explores the technological, medical, and cultural networks of insulin pump treatment to uncover the role these biomedicalized treatment acts play in the structuring of people, their bodies, and the values built around medical technologies. Diabetes treatment devices, I argue, become integral components of users’ daily practices and interactions. The textures of those experiences are manifest in people’s material interactions with their own bodies, social and intimate interactions with others, possession and valuation of devices, and (in)access to treatments and pharmaceuticals.
By analyzing personal interviews alongside archival materials and digital media produced by people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D), this study advances knowledge about the experience of medical device use by people with T1D, and centers device-connectedness within cultural studies of twenty-first century Medicalization more broadly. Employing an analytical framework focused on the situatedness of bodies, knowledges, and technologies on the one hand, and the varied sensory experiences of disease and device use on the other, I conceptualize the category of compelled use that places analyses of agency at the core of user studies. In the case of people with T1D, compelled use is characterized by an expanded network wherein insulin pumps function as actors inside and outside the body simultaneously. By conceptualizing this internal/external framework, this study generates a productive overlap between Material Culture Studies and Science and Technology Studies, rethinking contemporary definitions of what constitutes sensory experience.
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The network of devices involved in insulin pump treatment reads and quantifies the physiological processes of Type 1 Diabetes as it performs life-sustaining functions inside and upon users’ bodies. Together, these devices gather that information to produce what I call Datafied Body Doubles: numerical stand-ins for the body that recreate them as both usable and controllable for pump users and their physicians. By establishing and normalizing a system of quantification through blood glucose testing and temporally mapping body-readings into data collections, these Datafied Body Doubles fundamentally alter the conceptual and material experience of living with Diabetes. As medically-compelled users, people with Type 1 Diabetes participate in their own datafication through their continued use of those devices—a choice which is not much of a choice at all—but their bodies are re-created and used to drive their participation in those very techno-medicalized treatments nevertheless.
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TeeOneDee, self-proclaimed YouTube Diabetic “Gooroo”, and other pump users-turned-advisors have responded to these and similar issues by uploading videos discussing and demonstrating the best practices for “wearing” their insulin pumps—the most common action word used in each case—for the dual purpose of: 1) hiding the device out of sight, and 2) making its use the least awkward and in-the-way as possible. In what follows, I will analyze TeeOneDee’s instructional video “Where to put your insulin pump” as a representative case study to identify the semiotic and rhetorical situation in which it is set, as well as the narrative programs that can lead users to multiple objects of value simultaneously: on the figurative level, treating chronic illness with the least amount of interference to daily activities and passing as non-diabetic; on the discursive level, feeling “normal” by turning “non-normal” signifiers (i.e., technological treatment acts) into unacknowledged, empowered, perfunctory acts of passing.
Works-in-Progress
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This book-length study identifies the power structures that make the use of insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors medically and culturally compulsory for people with Type 1 Diabetes (T1D). By analyzing a range of materials including oral histories, personal interviews, digital media, and patient advocacy publications through a Crip-Feminist STS perspective, I challenge the ubiquitous "liberation" narratives associated with insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors in the public and medical lexicon. Chapters are organized around various sites of cultural discourse related to T1D, conducting textual, visual, and material analyses of device use as presented there, and grounding those discursive themes in personal accounts by patient-users. In so doing, I call attention to and critique the normalization of ableist conceptions of embodied freedom that discount/devalue life with chronic illness and that permeate cultural understandings of T1D, identifying rich sites of much needed nuance in discussions of Diabetes treatment devices and of medical device use in the US more broadly.
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In this paper, I interrogate the origins of at-home blood glucose testing and attempt to narrativize the ambiguities of Richard K. Bernstein’s revolutionary self-experimentation. Using personal interview data and his own Diabetes publications, I will unpack how Bernstein procured a blood glucose meter and began the first recorded case of at-home blood testing in 1969, all in direct opposition to his physicians’ directions and the device’s intended use. His experiment, I argue, established the patterns of daily glucose testing, carbohydrate-tracking, and insulin injection that have become standard practice in Diabetes treatment world-wide today, accounting for Diabetes as a dynamic bodily process. It was also, as I will show, deeply invested in cultural conceptions of normalcy and the medicalized control of “problem” bodies that still define Type 1 life today.
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This paper analyzes Type 1 Diabetes (T1D) patient-user training within video games from the 1990s through the 2010s. From limited-release titles for the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, to handheld releases with peripheral devices, to mobile-format virtual reality games, these productions gameify T1D treatment trainings in an attempt to connect with children newly-diagnosed and confronted with a new world of daily treatments and practices. By conducting close-read critical playthroughs of each title, I attempt to bring health education under the auspice of Game Studies and further complicate broad cultural conceptions of Diabetes more generally.
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In this paper, I argue that material and datafied bodies are also fundamentally social, and these embodied experiences require an agency-centered reframing of bodies/the body to account for the complexities of choice and materiality in T1D treatment and life more generally. The freedom these informants have been promised through their devices, and have in some cases sought out with vigor, is actually a freedom from their own bodies and lives deemed unlivable. Yet people with T1D are stuck in a medicalized system both compulsory and unrealistic, both life-sustaining and body-controlling. The tension built into that type of liminal experience can be a lot to handle, especially when added to the experience of living with chronic illness in general. In response, some people use that tense in-between space to push back against the defining and confining that networked insulin pump treatment can produce. In so doing, they call attention to and critique the normalization of ableist conceptions of embodied freedom that discount/devalue life with chronic illness and that permeate cultural understandings of T1D, identifying rich sites of much needed nuance in discussions of Diabetes treatment devices and of medical device use in the US more broadly.