Short Bio
Luana Pesarini (she/her) is a PhD candidate in the DFG research training group “Fixing Futures: Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies” and a research associate in the ZEVEDI project group “Humanmedizinische Datenkörper: Zur Erzeugung bio-digitaler Zwillinge” (Human-Medical Data Bodies: On the Creation of Bio-Digital Twins). Luana studied Sociology and Philosophy at Goethe University Frankfurt, where she also worked as a student assistant at the chair for “Sociological Theory and History of Theory.”Her research fields include theories of materiality, medical sociology, history of medicine and neuroscience, science and technology studies, as well as trans feminism.
Project Description
In view of the growing problematization of mental health issues, the European Union funds the development of various predictive technologies in the medical sector, promising to provide novel ways of prevention through early intervention. One of these technologies, which is laden with particularly high expectations regarding its ability to diagnose, treat, and prevent the development of psychiatric disorders, is Virtual Brain Twin (VBT) technology. A VBT is a digital twin of the human brain that can be individually tailored to a patient using health data to simulate the development of various psychiatric disorders in the brain as well as the potential effects of different treatment methods.
In my PhD project, I examine the political, neuroscientific, and clinical expectations written into the VBT technology. I am particularly interested in how VBT technology is expected to provide novel ways of governing mental health issues through its promised capability to anticipate the future of neuronal development. To trace the crafting of the expectations about VBT technology, I mobilize ethnographic methods on three planes: (1) ethnography of infrastructures, to follow how these expectations are facilitated through the integration of the VBT in the European ecosystem for brain research, (2) laboratory ethnography, to follow the translation of scientific expectations to clinical application, (3) conference ethnography and document analysis, to follow the translation of expectations between scientific and political actors.