Matthew Wolf-Meyer | Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (original) (raw)

Books by Matthew Wolf-Meyer

Ethnographic research has long been cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork is really like for r... more Ethnographic research has long been
cloaked in mystery around what fieldwork
is really like for researchers, how they collect
data, and how it is analyzed within the social
sciences. Naked Fieldnotes, a unique compen-
dium of actual fieldnotes from contemporary
ethnographic researchers from various mo-
dalities and research traditions, unpacks how
this research works.
The volume pairs fieldnotes based on obser-
vations, interviews, drawings, photographs,
soundscapes, and other encounters with
short, reflective essays, offering rich examples
of how fieldnotes are composed and shaped
by research experiences—giving scholars a
diverse, multimodal approach to conceptu-
alizing and doing ethnographic fieldwork.

Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity,... more Twentieth-century neuroscience fixed the brain as the basis of consciousness, the self, identity, individuality, even life itself, obscuring the fundamental relationships between bodies and the worlds that they inhabit. In Unraveling, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer draws on narratives of family and individual experiences with neurological disorders, paired with texts by neuroscientists and psychiatrists, to decenter the brain and expose the ableist biases in the dominant thinking about personhood.

Unraveling articulates a novel cybernetic theory of subjectivity in which the nervous system is connected to the world it inhabits rather than being walled off inside the body, moving beyond neuroscientific, symbolic, and materialist approaches to the self to focus instead on such concepts as animation, modularity, and facilitation. It does so through close readings of memoirs by individuals who lost their hearing or developed trauma-induced aphasia, as well as family members of people diagnosed as autistic—texts that rethink modes of subjectivity through experiences with communication, caregiving, and the demands of everyday life.

Arguing for a radical antinormative bioethics, Unraveling shifts the discourse on neurological disorders from such value-laden concepts as “quality of life” to develop an inclusive model of personhood that honors disability experiences and reconceptualizes the category of the human in all of its social, technological, and environmental contexts.

Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? Drawing on speculative fiction and... more Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?

Drawing on speculative fiction and social theory, Theory for the World to Come is the beginning of a conversation about theories that move beyond nihilistic conceptions of the capitalism-caused Anthropocene and toward generative bodies of thought that provoke creative ways of thinking about the world ahead.

Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs, therapy, and other remedies trying to g... more Americans spend billions of dollars every year on drugs, therapy, and other remedies trying to get a good night’s sleep. Anxieties about not getting enough sleep and the impact of sleeplessness on productivity, health, and happiness pervade medical opinion, the workplace, and popular culture. In The Slumbering Masses, Matthew J. Wolf-Meyer addresses the phenomenon of sleep and sleeplessness in the United States, tracing the influence of medicine and industrial capitalism on the sleeping habits of Americans from the nineteenth century to the present.

Before the introduction of factory shift work, Americans enjoyed a range of sleeping practices, most commonly two nightly periods of rest supplemented by daytime naps. The new sleeping regimen—eight uninterrupted hours of sleep at night—led to the pathologization of other ways of sleeping. Arguing that the current model of sleep is rooted not in biology but in industrial capitalism’s relentless need for productivity, The Slumbering Masses examines so-called Z-drugs that promote sleep, the use of both legal and illicit stimulants to combat sleepiness, and the contemporary politics of time. Wolf-Meyer concludes by exploring the extremes of sleep, from cases of perpetual sleeplessness and the sleepwalking defense in criminal courts to military experiments with ultra-short periods of sleep.

Drawing on untapped archival sources and long-term ethnographic research with people who both experience and treat sleep abnormalities, Wolf-Meyer analyzes and sharply critiques how sleep and its supposed disorders are understood and treated. By recognizing the variety and limits of sleep, he contends, we can establish more flexible expectations about sleep and, ultimately, subvert the damage of sleep pathology and industrial control on our lives.

Papers by Matthew Wolf-Meyer

reconstruction.eserver.org

Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): The Play's the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cultures. G... more Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): The Play's the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cultures. Guest Editors: Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman PJ Crook. ... Introduction. MatthewWolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, "Allegorical Reductions and Social Reconstructions". ...

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002

In theory, academic publishing is about active participation in a community of schol ars. In prac... more In theory, academic publishing is about active participation in a community of schol ars. In practice, academic publishing is about gaining status by getting something printed in the most static venue possible. At its worst, the Journal is an insider's club where gatekeepers tag select works for limited circulation, and scholars hum bly submit to this hierarchy. For cultural studies scholars, many of whom make a great show about their "radical" politics, the limitations of the print journal should provoke some reflection. Instead of asking how we as scholars actively participate in replicating the economy of prestige at the price of knowledge, we get comfort able with the culture of the Academy. We start to believe our own hype. As a project, Reconstruction takes its own shape as material and criticism is added, changing the meaning of what came before and creating new possibilities for things to come. Because of its collaborative nature, Reconstruction should allow us to reconsider the concept of the "organic intellectual," allowing many types of intellectuals from many traditions and non-traditions to insert themselves into aca demic discussion. But more importantly, Reconstruction contains the potential for intellectual projects that are themselves organic in their growth-living cultural texts which are not subject to the authority of individual scholars. As such, the concept of scholarly "authority," which is bound up in the concept of authorship, is surpassed by a vital, evolving, intellectual movement: no one voice speaks, instead there exists a chorus of articulated thought.

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2023

Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of ... more Dominant anthropological theories of mind, cognition, and consciousness reify particular ways of being in the world as “normal,” which marginalizes the experiences of people who do not meet normative expectations of personhood or exhibit nonnormative subjectivities. By focusing on atypical forms of communication and self-representation in the ethnographic record, which draws from work in the anthropology of disability and psychological anthropology, we argue for the need to attend to interactions and behavior as the necessary basis for anthropological studies of personhood and subjectivity. These foci, which build on a foundation provided by affect theory and disability studies, stand to open up anthropological conceptions of personhood and subjectivity and resituate the process of attribution in making persons and subjects. We articulate a psychotic anthropology that centers atypical forms of consciousness and seeks to unsettle anthropological assumptions about mind, cognition, and consciousness.

Feminist Anthropology, 2020

What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In expl... more What would happen if we accepted technological connection as a form of reckoning kinship? In
exploring this position, I draw on accounts of disability and illness. First, I focus on an account of fecal
microbial transplant use and the intimate connections the technology creates between the recipient
and donor. This is followed with the case of a woman who relies upon facilitated communication to
communicate with her social others, which depends on her use of other persons to interact with
a keyboard. In both cases, material connections with and through technology disrupt the putative
nature of kinship as based in “custom” and “blood.” Taking technologicalmediation in the production
of kinship networks seriously destabilizes humanist conceptions of the contours and capacities of
bodies, eroding the distinction between self and world. In apprizing the role of technology in making
kinship networks, attention to disability and illness experiences of the world point to ways out of
dominant conceptions of the human and the need to ethnographically attend to nonnormative bodily
engagements with material worlds as the basis for emergent forms of personhood and subjectivity.

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational t... more Anthropological models of personhood suggest that the individual is produced through relational ties to others, including humans and nonhumans. American ideas about the individual are deeply ideological, obscuring the human relations that make ‘personhood’ a possible, desirable concept that motivates subjection. Attending to neurological disorders and the technologies that attempt to remedy communication impairments shows that not only is the labour of other humans obscured in producing the individual, but so are the facilitating capacities of technologies and institutions. This article focuses on memoirs of disability and ethnographic and historiographic research on neuroscience to show how personhood is facilitated and produced through engagements with people, technologies, and institutions that attempt to render particular forms of subjection through communicative practices.

American Anthropologist, 2019

Anthropologists are well poised to contribute to an immanent theory of human physiological experi... more Anthropologists are well poised to contribute to an immanent theory of human physiological experiences that accounts for the broad social and environmental influences that shape individual and community experiences of health and disease. This article forwards a theory of “the biology of everyday life” as a means to conceptualize the interactions between institutional expectations of behavior, cultural norms, and biological plasticity. Drawing on a wide variety of research on human sleep, this article shows how the expression of sleep needs vary within and between societies and are shaped primarily not by innate biological drives but cultural norms embedded in the institutions that comprise the infrastructure of everyday life. Embracing perspectives from laboratory scientists, social theorists, and ethnographers, the biology of everyday life offers a way to conceptualize human nature not as a set of drives but a supple interaction of physiological plasticity, cultural expectations, and social organization.

Bioethics, 2019

Recent approaches in the medical and social sciences have begun to lay stress on “plasticity” as ... more Recent approaches in the medical and social sciences have begun to lay stress on “plasticity” as a key feature of human physiological experiences. Plasticity helps to account for significant differences within and between populations, particularly in relation to variations in basic physiological processes, such as brain development, and, in the context of this article, daily sleep needs. This article proposes a novel basis for the redevelopment of institutions in accordance with growing awareness of human variation in physiological needs, and articulates a theory of multibiologism. This approach seeks to expand the range of “normal” physiological experiences to respond to human plasticity, but also to move beyond critiques of medical practice that see medicine as simply responding to capitalist demands through the medicalization of “natural” processes. Instead, by focusing on how the institutions of U.S. everyday life—work, family, and school—structure the lives of individuals and produce certain forms of sleep as pathological, this article proposes that minor alterations in institutions could result in less pathologization for individuals and communities. Multibiologism provides a foundation for shared priorities in the social sciences, in bioethics, and in medical practice, and may lay the groundwork for emergent collaborations in institutional reform.

Faculty mentoring of graduate students is one of those things that is rightly the subject of recu... more Faculty mentoring of graduate students is one of those things that is rightly the subject of recurrent conversation; there are good mentors and bad, lack of clarity in faculty expectations and student responses, sustainable and deeply-broken models of graduate student training, all of which seem to perpetuate themselves (often unreflexively). The faculty who are best at mentoring recognize that it is a dynamic process, and that not one model works for all students, and, moreover, that the process of mentoring students leads to new techniques and understandings of the process. Sometimes it takes graduate students to precipitate some faculty growth. That all said, this is what I’ve learned in my eight years of graduate study and eleven years of working with graduate students, which I offer as a two-sided compact, what students should do, and what faculty should provide:

Somatosphere, 2017

The last thirty years have seen an intensification in ways of thinking about our health and disea... more The last thirty years have seen an intensification in ways of thinking about our health and disease in the future tense. Risk, precarity, subjunctivity — all three point to the ways that temporality shape human experience, subjectively, interpersonally, and institutionally. But what if we turn our attention away from the clinic and its therapeutic technologies — which focus on the unfolding everyday futures of therapy and the modest gains and losses experienced through aging, debilitation, and disease progression — and attend, instead, to the speculative futures of health and disease in science fiction, futurism, and other genres that creatively attempt to think through, conceptualize, and bring into being particular futures? These futures might operate at the level of the individual — different conceptions of the self and subjectivity — and they might operate at the level of society and its institutions, entailing new social orders as well as innovations in current institutions.

Somatosphere, 2016

Last fall, a group of researchers – mostly biological anthropologists and sleep researchers – pub... more Last fall, a group of researchers – mostly biological anthropologists and sleep researchers – published a study of three ‘pre-industrial’ communities, one in Latin America, two in Africa, and claimed that based on their data, consolidated nightly sleep is a human norm, inferring that it is the product of natural selection. The media picked up the research findings, and I read write ups of it in a number of outlets, which led me to the original article and sparked conversations with me and other sleep-interested scholars about the validity of the research. A couple of months later, I was asked by the editor of Sleep Health if I would like to respond to the findings of the article, in part because the researchers made an argument against a claim that I have made – corroborating Roger Ekirch – that human sleep has only recently consolidated, largely as a result of industrial capitalism in the 19th century. But I was primarily motivated by the anthropology-informed opportunity to point out that no contemporary society offers us a window to some pre-industrial past or earlier evolutionary moment. To suggest otherwise – and here I’m quoting myself – ‘verges on scientific racism.’

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2018

Microbial science may be the new solutionism in science and medicine. It’s hard not to see the la... more Microbial science may be the new solutionism in science and medicine. It’s hard not to see the last several years of hullaballoo over the microbiome as not an extension of scientific panacea-seeking from the late 20th and early 21st centuries: first cracking and cataloging the genome would solve all our health problems, then the rise of neuroscience and the Decade of the Brain (which has turned into a Century of the Brain), and now it’s the microbiome’s turn. And nanotechnology is in there somewhere too.

Except that this solutionism is much older than the DNA sequencing, neuromolecular reductionism, nanomachines, and synthetic biology. Medical and scientific solutionism extends back to the very origins of allopathic medicine and its disciplinary unification in 20th century biomedicine. New technologies open ways of seeing the world, but also the imaginations of scientists, the public, and journalists in their constant search for a panacea for our individual and social ills.

Journal of the Anthropology of North America, 2018

Key social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and ... more Key social scientific concepts are based in local theories particular to the North Atlantic, and the United States especially, and have been exported by anthropologists to analyze diverse ethnographic contexts despite the lack of interrogation of their status as local, American theories. In this article, I address this situation by focusing on the elaboration of American normalcy in its present moment, dependent upon a lay reconfiguration of “ideology,” “hegemony,” and “history.” In advancing this analysis, I focus on popular media journalism and its analysis of the Trump presidency. My approach is bifocal, at once focusing on the history of these Marxian concepts while attending to their permutations in the present. Focusing on these concepts and their relation to ideas of the individual and institutions opens up possibilities for the symmetrical analysis of knowledge production practices and everyday actions of popular and expert communities, and lays the foundation for the cultural anthropology of the U.S. to critique contemporary U.S. politics as well as social science knowledge production and its circulation.

Cultural Anthropology, 2018

Why, in literary studies, is science fiction so trivial, while in anthropology it seems so vital?... more Why, in literary studies, is science fiction so trivial, while in anthropology it seems so vital? The answer, I suggest, lies in the project of anthropology and its methodological insufficiency to answer the questions it poses. In the context of literary studies, SF is just another genre—and, like all genre literature, is tarred with its history of being popular. But for anthropologists, SF provides a natural laboratory that has long been the basis of the cross-cultural ethnographic project.

reconstruction.eserver.org

Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): The Play&#x27;s the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cul... more Reconstruction 6.1 (Winter 2006): The Play&#x27;s the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cultures. Guest Editors: Matthew Wolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman PJ Crook. ... Introduction. MatthewWolf-Meyer and Davin Heckman, &quot;Allegorical Reductions and Social Reconstructions&quot;. ...

In 2013, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration held a workshop t... more In 2013, the National Institutes of Health and the Food and Drug Administration held a workshop to determine the risks and benefits associated with the experimental use of fecal microbial transplants to treat Clostridium difficile and other gastroenterological disorders. By focusing on the proceedings of the NIH-FDA workshop on the treatment of the human microbiome, the question of how medicine colonizes human bodies through microbial transplants raises questions about what an individual body is, how determinative of human health the microbiome is, and what the limits of molecular biomedicine are when the microbiome is taken into consideration. In the workshop presentations and discussion of this emerging treatment, experts use ideas about the normal, regular, and standard to move between scales of bodily analysis, from the microbial to the body politic, demonstrating how the individual and society are deeply influenced by the unruly community of microbial symbiotes humans host. (forthcoming in Medical Anthropology Quarterly)

In this chapter, forthcoming in *The Anthropology of Policing* (Garriott & Karpiak, eds), I discu... more In this chapter, forthcoming in *The Anthropology of Policing* (Garriott & Karpiak, eds), I discuss the history of medical police, an early biopolitical institution developed to ensure the health of individuals and the public. The medical police were explicitly tasked to address the eruptions of nature into civilization. I then examine a set of situations – neglect and contamination – in which nature erupts into contemporary society, and which U.S. law has difficulty capturing as unlawful. In conclusion, I argue that these difficulties in the law produce ideas about order and disorder related to the place of nature in society that are congealing into criminal types who serve as threats to civilization.

Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future? Drawing on speculative fiction and... more Can social theories forge new paths into an uncertain future?

reconstruction.eserver.org

Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, 2002

Annual Review of Anthropology, 2023

Feminist Anthropology, 2020

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 2020

American Anthropologist, 2019

Bioethics, 2019

Somatosphere, 2017

Somatosphere, 2016

Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2018

Journal of the Anthropology of North America, 2018

Cultural Anthropology, 2018

reconstruction.eserver.org

Prognostication has become central to medical practice, offering clinicians and patients views of... more Prognostication has become central to medical practice, offering clinicians and patients views of particular futures enabled by biomedical expertise and technologies. Drawing on research on
diabetes care and sleep medicine in the US, in this article we suggest that subjectivity is increasingly modeled on medical understandings of chronic illness. These chronic conceptions of
the self and society instill in individuals an anxiety about future health outcomes that, in turn, motivate practices oriented at self-care to avoid negative health outcomes and particular medical
futures. At its most extreme, these anxieties of self-care trouble conceptions of self and social belonging, particularly in the future tense, leading patients and clinicians to consider intergenerational and public health based and the threats that individual patients pose for others.

Sleep, Medicine, and Modern American Life, 2012

Few social theorists can claim to have had a greater impact across the social sciences and humani... more Few social theorists can claim to have had a greater impact across the social sciences and humanities since the 1980s as Michel Foucault. A wide-ranging thinker, Foucault built upon the work of many of his predecessors in the social sciences, philosophy, and history to develop a robust, interdisciplinary framework for thinking about modernity as a social phenomenon. This project began with his elaboration of ways of knowing the mind and body – through psychology and medicine, as intellectual and institutional practices – and later developed into more strictly ‘disciplinary’ institutions, namely criminology and sexology. Alongside the development of his understandings of modernity and discipline emerged his theorization of biopolitics and biopower and governmentality, ideas still motivating a great array of scholarship in the humanities and social sciences.

This course offers a close reading of Foucault's most central texts, focusing, primarily on his elaboration of 'discipline' across the asylum, hospital, prison, and sexology. It seeks to place Foucault's work in relation to his mentors and influences -- Louis Althusser and George Canguilhem, Norbert Elias and Sigmund Freud -- and traces his legacy in contemporary humanistic and social scientific research, specifically through ethnographies of contemporary disciplinary institutions (again, the asylum, hospital, prison, and sexology). The course concludes by focusing on Gilles Deleuze's elaboration of 'control societies' as a successor to 'disciplinary institutions.' Students should attain a robust understanding of Foucault and his work, as well as its implications for contemporary scholarship.

The future hasn’t always been of such intense interest to societies. What, over the last century,... more The future hasn’t always been of such intense interest to societies. What, over the last century, has intensified this interest, and how does this interest map onto specific social concerns? In this course, we take a long view of concern about the future – as threat, opportunity, and crisis – to consider the moments in which specific futures have become salient for large numbers of people. In so doing, we focus on philosophy, social science, and literature (especially science fiction) as they operate in speculative idioms – or attempt to capture other people’s speculative moments. This takes us through particular historical moments in the U.S. and North Atlantic (especially Western Europe) to think about forces like industrialization and deindustrialization, colonialism and decolonial movements, and modernization, development, and indigenous rights movements. Taken together, they help to show how concerns about the future enable and limit particular kinds of social formations, alliance building, and political organization.

Somatosphere Presents A Book Forum on Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective L... more Somatosphere Presents A Book Forum on Tracing Autism: Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and the Affective Labor of Neuroscience by Des Fitzgerald

Contributions from:
Elizabeth Fein - Duquesne University; Matthew Wolf--Meyer - Binghampton University; M. Ariel Cascio - McGill University; Michael Orsini - University of Ottawa; Francisco Ortega - State University of Rio de Janeiro
Reply - Des Ftizgerald - Cardiff University

How we might study that which we cannot see, count, or measure? How might we analyze invisibility... more How we might study that which we cannot see, count, or measure? How might we analyze invisibility? This is especially important in the context of injuries-to bodies, to infrastructures, to populations of humans and non-humans-that are either undetectable (as with minor strokes) or erased (as in political attempts to obscure events), and the aftermaths they produce, which can lead to novel connections and regenerations. In this panel, we reflect on the invisible and unknown, and invite presenters to explore other ways of knowing injuries. We aim to move beyond the typical critical social critique of scientific evidence-that is, accusations of marginalized evidence-to consider how we might approach the invisible? Fantasies, delusions, visions-each is marked by its intimacy and inexpressibility. But might we make them social? We seek to go beyond an inventory of exclusions to consider the invisible, that which we don't know, and which nonetheless lingers in its effects. We consider other types of evidence, and how novel approaches to evidence might provide ways for articulating anti-epistemologies that destabilize ways of knowing-for scholars as well as our interlocutors. Not simply stating its absence, but asking how we might bring it into focus, make it visible and readable, to include the excluded, as a means to counter what we know, or what think we know, about evidence, interiority, and relationality. How might we interrupt conventional renderings of the injured? How can we render the unknowable knowable for invisible trauma and damaged states?