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Phoenix Police officers are required to wear Body-Worn Cameras while out on patrol and must have the cameras turned on when interacting with the public. The Body-Worn Camera (BWC) Policy was initially established as a means of accruing evidence and increasing police accountability when in the presence of the public. However, BWC technology has the ability to perform many other useful functions. The information provided by the cameras could be used to reduce the paperwork done by police officers while on duty, thus allowing them to spend more time taking calls from dispatch. The versatility of the body-worn camera and its components also make it an ideal pairing for an electrocardiograph (ECG) device to aid in the health of officers and law enforcement retention.
It is in this context that this dissertation, informed by critical disability studies and feminist science and technology studies, examines the understanding and enactment of disability and responsibility in relation to biomedical technologies. I draw from qualitative empirical data from three distinct case studies, each focused on a different biomedical technology: prenatal genetic screening and diagnosis, deep brain stimulation, and do-it-yourself artificial pancreas systems. Analyzing semi-structured interviews and primary documents through an inductive framework that takes up elements of Grounded Theory and hermeneutic phenomenology, this research demonstrates a series of tensions. As disability becomes increasingly associated with discrete biological characteristics and medical professionals claim a growing authority over disabled bodyminds, users of these technologies are caught in a double bind of personal responsibility and epistemic invalidation. Technologies, however, do not occupy either exclusively oppressive or liberatory roles. Rather, they are used with full acknowledgement of their role in perpetuating medical authority and neoliberal paradigms as well as their individual benefit. Experiential and embodied knowledge, particular when in tension with clinical knowledge, is invalidated as a transgression of expert authority. To reject these invalidations, communities cohering around subaltern knowledges emerge in resistance to the mismatched priorities and expectations of medical authority, creating space for alternative disabled imaginaries.