Building Biosociality through Visualizations of Genome-Wide Sequencing Risk for an Online Patient Decision-Making Aid
(DECIDE)

published in:
Biomedical Visions:
Epistemology, Medicine, and Art Practice

Editors: Elizabeth Hughes, Alfred Freeborn
Authors: Adam Christianson, Ariane Hanemaayer, Sophia Martineck, Alexandra Hamann, Jan M. Friedman, and Alison Elliott


We live in an age of biomedical visions. There seems to be no end to the demystification of the body through visualization technologies and the promise of health is irresistible. Yet alongside these promising technologies, inequalities in healthcare persist. Life and illness play out in the gap between visualized bodies and ideological notions of health and disease. This publication brings together perspectives from art history, visual science studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology to encounter watercolors, sculpture, comics, advertising, and infographics. Images are a primary way of recognizing the body, but they inevitably promise too much and disappoint us in our quest for bodily self-control. The collection brings together epistemology, medicine and art to understand what biomedicine looks like and how we might view it differently in the past and in the future.


In our chapter, we analyze the visual practices through which risk is communicated in decision-making aids for genetic counseling. Building on a sociological analysis of an existing decision aid, we developed a new visual representation that renders risk visible as a biosocial, affective, and relational experience.

Hatje Cantz Verlag
ISBN 978-3-7757-6085-0

get the book︎
decision-making aid ︎