Vita

Werdegang:

Geboren 1970
Studium der Biologie (Schwerpunkt Humangenetik) und Philosophie an der Universität Tübingen
Abschluss als Dipl-Biologin
Wissenschaftl. Mitarbeiterin im Projekt "Das Alltags-Gen" (Leitung Prof. Dr. Barbara Duden), Universität Hannover
seit mehreren Jahren Mitglied einer internationalen Arbeitsgruppe von Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftlern verschiedener Disziplinen an, die sich der Erforschung moderner Mythen widmen, wie der Glaube, Medizinkonsum produziere Gesundheit, Datenmanagement vermehre Wissen und professionelle Beratung befähige zu einer freien Entscheidung.

Biography:

My research focuses on the social and cultural consequences of professional counseling. Today every conceivable life situation presents a potential need for counseling, from jobs and marriage to death and grief. Professional guidance has advanced in the past fifty years to become one of the most important social technologies.
In the twentieth century, knowledge and competencies, to be valuable, had to be acquired under the technical supervision of experts and evaluated by their scientific standards. In the twenty-first century, not only knowledge and skills, but also deliberation is being refashioned as a scientific object. Freedom, choice and autonomy are so re-defined that to be appropriately exercised they require scientific inputs and guidance services. My research on the transformation of citizens into expert- and information-dependent clients ties into the results of social science studies that analyze the emergence of a new subjectivity in an epoch of risk-calculation and bio-political self-governance.
During the last seven years my studies have been guided by the collaboration of an interdisciplinary circle of scholars (economists, medieval historians, musicologists, etc.) who dedicate themselves to the analysis of modern myths: that the consumption of medicine leads to health; that the internalization of information is knowledge; or that instructed decision-making enhances autonomy. With Ivan Illich as our mentor we met several times a year in different cities and countries (e.g. State College-PA, Cuernavaca-Mexico, Florence-Italy, Oakland-CA) in order to pursue our joint effort of unraveling the socio-genesis of modern certainties. Currently, my main collaborators are Prof. Sajay Samuel (Accounting, PSU) with whom I study the perversion of autonomy by managerial decision-making, and Prof. Barbara Duden (Sociology, University of Hannover) with whom I investigate how scientific concepts undermine somatic autoception.
Academic career: My training as a "hedge sitter"
In order to study the social and cultural consequences of professional counseling, I have to be aware of the heterogeneity between scientific concepts and their everyday meaning. Trained as both a geneticist and a social scientist I am well placed to analyze the effects of scientific terms in ordinary parlance. As a natural scientist, I know about the limited denotations of a technical term; and as a social scientist I study the innumerable connotations of the same term when it enters everyday conversations such as medical consultations or political debates. Moving between genetics and social science, I see myself as a "hedge-sitter" (Zaunreiterin). Sitting on the fence, with my left ear I try to stay attuned to the index of "The Journal of Molecular Biology" and "Genetics"; and with my right ear I try to figure out what people mean, feel and fear when they use genetic critters.
Between 1989 and 1996, I studied biology and philosophy at the University of Tübingen and earned my diploma in the department of human genetics with a thesis in population biology. While working on the genetic makeup of Madagascar monkeys, I became aware of the ambiguity of technical terminology when it migrates from the laboratory. The works of the natural scientist Ludwik Fleck and the philologist Uwe Pörksen made me understand that terms such as "mutation" or "genotype" have a precise denotation for biologists, but as part of ordinary conversations are loaded with everyday meaning and become powerless to denote anything. This insight led me to examine the havoc such escapees from laboratory slang wreak in the everyday world. In addition to my philosophical studies on the theory and history of science I studied the heterogeneity of scientific terminology and every day language.
Together with Ivan Illich, Barbara Duden and other colleagues I spent two months at the STS-program at Penn State University in summer 1996 and began to collaborate with Prof. Sajay Samuel (Accounting) on the problem of managerial decision-making in everyday life. Prof. Carl Mitcham invited me to spend two more months at the STS-program in summer 1997 in order to present my research project on genetic counseling and to review the U.S. literature on the social aspects of human genetics.
From 1997 to 2000 I wrote my PhD in Sociology at the University of Bremen with the historian Barbara Duden as my advisor. I took genetic counseling as a paradigm for the popularization of genetic concepts and, on the basis of thirty observed and recorded prenatal counseling sessions, I analyzed the new kind of decision that the counselee is urged to make. In these encounters a physician embeds textbook information and statistical tables in an exhortation that challenges his pregnant client to choose between different prenatal test options, basing her decision on the information he has delivered. Inevitably, the demand to project such misplaced concreteness into the happening in her belly pushes the women into troubling misapprehensions: The geneticist suggests that client conceive of the being who will become her kin as a risk profile, a faceless member of various risk classes. Because the pregnant woman assumes that the counselor talks about her person, a statistical risk estimating no more than a frequency in a population turns into a personal menace for her.
My thesis was published under the title, Die verrechnete Hoffnung. Von der selbstbestimmten Entscheidung durch genetische Beratung ("The mathematization of hope. On autonomous decision-making through genetic counseling"). It challenges the basic assumptions of studies on prenatal counseling which analyze the new decisions pregnant women are urged to make as admittedly ambiguous, but inevitable, and therefore stress the importance of information and free choice. Since counseling is usually understood and promoted as a means to empower pregnant women, my analysis of the symbolic effects of instructed decision-making provoked lively debates among feminist academics as well as midwives, women's health activists and prenatal counselors in Germany.