The Connector: Living with Experimental Neuroprosthetics (Experimental Futures) - Softcover

Alexandra Middleton

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1478038675 ISBN 13: 9781478038672

Publisher: Duke University Press, 2026

Synopsis

In The Connector, Alexandra Middleton examines how the frontiers of experimental medical science are always the everyday lived experiences for patients and their families and communities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Swedish labs and clinics that develop neuromusculoskeletal protheses, as well as in the homes of patients enrolled in clinical trials as they live with these new forms of prosthetics, Middleton shows how patients’ sensory experiences and domestic worlds become key spaces of scientific knowledge production that extend well beyond their visits to the lab. Through storytelling that centers the patients’ embodied knowledge and labor, along with the scientists who work closely with them, Middleton depicts how “connection” entails inhabiting the liminal space between ideation and materialization, a space punctuated not only by breakthroughs and breakdowns, but the slow work of the everyday. The Connector critically examines where biomedical innovation, scientific discovery, and the “cutting edge” come from in ways that foreground the importance of the domestic spaces in which experimental science take place.

About this title

About the Author

Alexandra Middleton is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

Edition details

• Publisher: Duke University Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1478038675
• ISBN 13: 9781478038672
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 290