Mary Ebeling
Jueves 21 de marzo, 2013
4:00 pm

How does medical and pharmaceutical marketing and branding construct us as neoliberal agents? How, exactly, does a patient enact the brand identity of implantable medical devices, like a defibrillator implanted into her heart? Mary Ebeling will discuss these topics and more during the evening.

Mary Ebeling is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Department of Culture and Communication at Drexel University. She has done extensive research on the commercialization of nanobiotechnologies, she has conducted ethnographies of medical marketing at New York City-based advertising firms as well as in laboratories building medical devices. Her research interests span several areas of social inquiry including ideas concerning labor, skills and the production of knowledge and DIY strategies in postindustrial science. She is particularly curious about the interfaces between the biological and the technical.

Her work has appeared in scientific and social science journals. Past research projects have explored how Sufi political culture from Sudan uses social media to create a political identity in exile. Her strength in the ability to move among research project to research project has given her an expanded field into her practice.

Marzo 18 – marzo 29
During her residency she will research the possibility of creating a performance that playfully interrogates the role that biotechnologies and genomics, especially when combined with speculative capitalism

Images: performance piece in collaboration with Mary Ebeling and two Philadelphia-based artists at Vox Populi: Parallax