British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2020, ‘Smart textiles, prostheses and the body’

Tomoko Tamari participated in the online (social media) 2020 British Sociological Association Annual Conference, given BSA Board of Trustees’ decision to cancel the conference, due to the Covid-19 outbreak. To continue support and help the sociological community during these difficult times, the committee encouraged delegates to upload their accepted abstract on their Twitter account to share its online presence during the planned Annual Conference week.

Image: BSA event poster

‘Smart textiles, prostheses and the body’
Tomoko Tamari

Abstract

This paper examines the social implications of prosthetic smart textile for the contemporary body. ‘Wearable technology’ (Quinn, 2002) along with ubiquitous computing, digital sensor technology, microfibers, biomimetics are becoming increasingly integrated into fabrics and clothing design. In this sense, ‘Fabric is our second skin’ (Pailes-Friedman, 2016), which implies fabric is ‘something added’ to our own skin as a prosthetic device. Prosthesis can also refer to both a material entity acting as a functional device and an aesthetic entity as an affective interface in interactions between the body and technology. The paper takes up the application of smart textiles as functional devices for medical and healthcare in order to discuss the merits and potential problems arising from its algorithmic personalization data management and the uncertain calculability of medical practitioners’ ‘tacit’ knowledge (embodied skill and experiences). The paper also focuses on the use of biosensor textiles as affective interfaces in contemporary fashion to examine the qualities and difficulties of bridging the gap between computational cognition and human emotions. By examining these cases, the paper considers smart textiles as ‘pharmakon’ (Stiegler, 2010). On the one hand, these wearable technologies enable smart textiles to become highly complex interactive biomechanical and computational devices which ‘add something new’ to improve human life. On the other hand, smart textiles as algorithmic ‘prosthetic memory’ devices, could not only reduce people’s bodies into quantified data subjects, but also govern the emotional life of individuals. In these circumstances, there could be potential threats towards the autonomous agency of individuals.