How should we understand the experience of encountering and interpreting images? What are their roles in science and medicine? How do they shape everyday life? Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology brings together scholars from multiple disciplines to investigate these questions. The contributors make use of the "postphenomenological" philosophical perspective, applying its distinctive ideas to the study of how images are experienced. These essays offer both philosophical analysis of our conception of images and empirical studies of imaging practice. The contributors analyze concrete examples from a variety of fields of science and medicine, including radiology, neuroscience, cytology, physics, remote sensing, and space science. They also include examples of imaging in everyday life, from smartphone apps to animated GIFs. Edited by Samantha J. Fried and Robert Rosenberger, this collection includes an extensive "primer" chapter introducing and expanding the postphenomenological account of imaging, as well as a set of short pieces by "critical respondents": prominent scholars who may not self-identify as doing postphenomenology but whose adjacent work is illuminating.
Samantha J. Fried is director of the Civic Studies Program at the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life at Tufts University. Robert Rosenberger is associate professor of philosophy at the Georgia Institute of Technology in the School of Public Policy.
Contents Introduction Samantha J. Fried & Robert Rosenberger SECTION 1: Primer 1. A Primer on Postphenomenology and Image Reading Robert Rosenberger SECTION 2: Postphenomenological Thought Experiments: Multiplying Multiples 2. Affect in the Age of the Image: The .gif Use Case Stacey O. Irwin 3. Science Comes Late to Sonification Don Ihde 4. Radiology as Skillful Coping and Enactive Hermeneutics: A Critique of Representations and Corresponding Truth Jan Kyrre Berg Friis SECTION 3: Embodied Postphenomenology: Ethnographies of the Interactive Multiple 5. Image Interpretation as Object Constitution: Hermeneutic Strategies in Neuroscientific Practice Bas de Boer 6. "To Be Or Not To Be": Hermeneutic Relations Through Technology in Clinical Cytology Anette Forss7. Not Too Queer To Be Straight And Not Too Straight To Be Queer: Becoming Bisexual Through The Screen Of Digital Hook-Up App Bumble Katie Warfield SECTION 4: Postphenomenology as Practice/Theory 8. Feynman Diagrams and the Phenomenology of Paper Tools Robert P. Crease 9. Collective Visual Hermeneutics: How Posthumanist Learning Forms Perception with Technologies Cathrine Hasse 10. Philosophize In It! Politicize With it!: Postphenomenology and Earth Remote Sensing as Sites of Political/Scientific Intervention Samantha J. Fried SECTION 5: Critical Respondents 11. Attending to the Otherwise: Reading Illusions through Virtual Reality Lisa Messeri 12. Reflections on Postphenomenological Crossings Janet Vertesi 13. Representationalism and Digital Imagery Will Sutherland and David Ribes About the Contributors
"Fried and Rosenberger have put together a volume that I will reference for years to come. Imaging is a topic that is evergreen in reflection on science and technology--and how we rely on visualized data and imagery more broadly in the world everyday. This volume represents the best of new work on the topic within philosophy of technology and STS. Imaging is never just imaging, and the volume's contributors make this clear, offering accounts of multistability, embodiment, classification, and sociality that accompany the visualization we do. I love how the volume includes both authors working within the postphenomenological tradition and those critical respondents from outside of the subfield. A strength of this volume is its breadth of cases and types of visualization--from satellites to cells to hook-up apps--as well as the in-depth treatment given in each chapter by the authors. I look forward to assigning these essays in my philosophy of technology classes."--Ashley Shew, Virginia Tech
