Forwarded from:    "Cora Olson" <[log in to unmask]>

Hello All,

I would like to put a panel together for the upcoming 4S (Society for the
Social Studies of Science) Conference in Copenhagen, Oct. 17-21, 2012. If
you are interested in being a part of this panel, please, submit a 250w or
less abstract to me by March 13. Details below.

Cheers,

Cora

Design(s) at the the Intersections of Sports, Science and Technology.
*working draft*
4S/EASSTS Copenhagen, October 17-20, 2012
http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

This session includes three presentations that explore design(s) at the
intersections of sports, science and technology. The first paper discusses
the technomedical advent of blood doping during the 1980s. These
technomedical researchers sought to determine the efficacy of blood doping;
instead, they designed an efficacious method to blood dope. The second
paper...The third paper... This session broadens the scope of science
studies to include sports as site of technoscientific practices. By asking
what design(s) lie at the intersections of sport, science and technology,
we bring sports' science and technology into the view of the larger STS
community.


Paper 1.
Designing Blood Doping: A Case of Sports' Technomedical Design
*working draft*
4S/EASSTS Copenhagen, October 17-20, 2012
Cora Olson

This paper discusses the technomedical advent of blood doping during the
1980s. These technomedical researchers sought to determine the efficacy of
blood doping; instead, they designed an efficacious method to blood dope.
This presentation looks at how "blood doping" emerged within sports
medicine and physiology from the 1970s to the early 1980s. This emergence
legitimated the claims of athletes and the anti-doping movement that adding
more blood to endurance athletes  could serve as a performance enhancer.
This legitimation marked these endurance athletes' bodies as potentially
transgressive while simultaneously normalizing and naturalizing the same
bodies. Using an ethics of uncertainty around blood doping claims American
and Canadian researchers worked to determine an effective means of blood
doping. This ethics relied on the uncertainty that blood reinfusion caused
any positive effect on athletes (technical uncertainty), uncertainty
whether blood doping should be thought of as cheating because similar
effects were possible through "natural" means (moral uncertainty and
ontological uncertainty), and uncertainty surrounding the physiological
processes of blood doping (a kind of techno-ontological uncertainty). This
ethics of uncertainty allowed these researchers to bypass the anti-doping
movements' larger ethics of fairness. This presentation traces how these
researchers moved blood doping from uncertain to certain, or designed blood
doping, through multiple normalizations---technical, subject,
physiological. In the process of these normalizations, endurance athletes
became the potential benefactor of blood doping.