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Issue 21

Medicine and the Body

As numerous bioethicists and artificial intelligence researchers have pointed out, technologies of medicine and the body have deep ties with military interests—providing a historical through line whose connections, implied and explicit, emerge throughout this issue. Despite computer science nomenclature that ascribe sentience and autonomy to automated decision-making and weapons systems, technologies narrated with commercial marketing terms like “AI” are embedded in, and direct consequences of, human intention and political insistence.

This issue asks: How can we provide a platform to survivors of systematic attempts at annihilation of their life-worlds funded and enabled—directly or indirectly—by US weapons-development and foreign policy? What is the relationship between computation and the transnational scale of state-sanctioned, extrajudicial vulnerability to premature death? This issue does not offer comprehensive answers to these questions but, rather, seeks to establish the grounds on which they can be posited in the first place.

editorial

Letter from the Editor on Medicine and the Body in Tech

J. Khadijah Abdurahman, Sucheta Ghoshal

Editor in Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman introduces Logic(s) issue 21

Logic(s) Enters The Collective at Incite

J. Khadijah Abdurahman

Editor in Chief J. Khadijah Abdurahman introduces The Collective, the new organizational configuration of Logic(s)

A Story of Resignation and Revival

michael falco-felderman

Personal narrative of michael falco-felderman, facilitator of The Collective, about their experiences and the future of their work on the The Collective

Introducing The Collective

A press release from Incite, introducing our new initiative called The Collective

listen&speak

View From the Nuba Mountains: An Interview with Kuna

“Previously, when I was outside of Sudan, I was very much like, “I’m just Sudanese.” But now, I find myself more and more—I don’t want to say less willing—but I will say I feel safer identifying as a Nuba.”

On Sudan and the Interminable Catastrophe: A Conversation with Bedour Alagraa

“In terms of genres of the human, I think that Sudan has a lot to tell the world about our assumptions about Man, because it’s a country that doesn’t have very many white people at all.”

Coming of Age during Wartime in Sudan: A Conversation with Omnia Mustafa

“When we are engaging with African people, they tell us, ‘You’re too Arab for us.’ And when we engage with Arab people, they tell us, ‘You’re too African for us.’”

“To See it All at Once”: Black Southern Placemaking Technologies with Zandria Robinson

“I think that the Southern city, all Southern cities are places spatially, where you can see the collision of time, to the point where you’re like, ‘What time is it? What time am I in?’”

On "patient." with Bettina Judd

Bettina Judd, Rezina Habtemariam

“I’m really self-aware at this point, in writing patient, that I am a researcher doing research in an attempt to recover that which cannot be recovered, and that is their voices.”

“This Whole Other Monster”: A Conversation about Resisting ICE’s “Alternatives to Detention” Program with Mario Perez

“Let’s call it for what it is: they’re not there to support you, they’re there to deport you.”

“Es otro monstruo por completo”:   Resistiendo al programa de Alternativas a la Detención del ICE

This interview with Mario Perez, originally published in English as “ ’This Whole Other Monster’: A Conversation about Resisting ICE’s ‘Alternatives to Detention’ Program” is translated into Spanish by Bárbara Suárez Galeano and Eric Jalain.

Who Gets to Live Forever? A Conversation about Biotechno-solutionism with Tamara Kneese and Santiago Sanchez

“The entire fantasy of living for much longer only makes sense if you have that kind of extreme wealth or if you believe that you have the capacity to achieve it.”

Designing Black Trans Revolution with Multimedia Artist Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley

“The problem with relying on the art world alone is, you will only show when someone offers you an exhibition—which means if no one’s asking you to show, you don’t do anything.”

features

Genocidal Technologies: The Deprivation of Medicine in Tigray

Teklehaymanot G. Weldemichel

“The decimation of medicine and healthcare was a genocidal technology used to actualize as many deaths as possible—and one whose future deployment can by no means be ruled out.”

Beyond Trans Archives, Beyond Trans Medicine

Os Keyes

“Where does such profound love, overflowing with significance, appear in formalized, statistical data indexing and what people’s post-treatment lives mean to the world? What does it mean, to medical history or analysis, to begin with people’s relations rather than their records?”

Reclaiming the Viral Asian Body

Leo Kim

“The truth is that we, as actors both individual and collective, are fundamentally enmeshed in/with the world. Our technologies weave their ways into our minds and bodies.”

Shafiqah Hudson Commemoration

REST IN POWER Shafiqah Hudson (January 10, 1978 – February 15, 2024)

dispatches

You’re Always on That Phone: How Being Online Sustained Sudan’s Youth Revolution 

Dinan Alasad

“The sit-in became a physical embodiment of the safe spaces we had only imagined could exist online. We congregated freely and spoke without bounds. We cared for each other in immediate ways.”

Curating Colonization: On Sharing Visuals of the Dead

William C. Anderson

“Using images to highlight the gruesome and merciless power of an oppressor does not necessarily generate sympathy for the oppressed; it can be a tool to reinforce the ruling order.”

Breaking the Cycle: Against the Militarization of Neuroscience Research

Christopher L. Dancy

“Adoption of a critical perspective on funding choices is possible—even for faculty previously connected to US military systems—but it is more labor intensive, entailing work that all too often lies outside of the research infrastructure universities provide.”

Tech Explainer: Brain–Computer Interfaces and Neural Prosthetics

Andrea Stocco

“The brain is the ultimate site of an individual’s identity, and implanted devices not only have access to it, but the potential to alter it.”

The Gig Is Up

Jane Chung

“The eight-hour workday was a hard-won victory by labor organizers of yesterday. Today, gig corporations are actively undermining those victories.”

Against the Grain: Indian Telemedicine and Its Discontents

Sylvia Karpagam

“Telemedicine in India reflects larger gaps within the healthcare system.”

Restraint

Clio Sady

“Where does the carceral state end and the welfare state begin?”

stories&poems

قبور وراء النافذة / “Graves behind the Window” معذبو الأرض / “The Wretched of the Earth”

Anees Ghanima, Abdalhadi Alijla, Leena Aboutaleb

A selection of poems by Gazan poet Anees Ghanima, Translator’s Note Leena Aboutaleb, and preface by Abdalhadi Alijla

Whispers of Vanished Childhood

Abdalhadi Alijla

“The deserted street felt like a canvas wiped clean, with only my mother and I left as the remaining strokes of a forsaken painting.”

Before We Were Born

Angela Liu

“Brain–body transfers (BBTs) became popular with influencers and celebrity couples first. The only way to truly understand someone is to become them, the ads read.”

First edition of Issue 21: Medicine and the Body released September 27, 2024.