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The role of the imagination in the development of Artificial Hearts: towards an understanding of embodied and shared imagination

Abstract

This article explores the role of imagination in the development of circulatory assistant devices, technologies also known as Artificial Hearts, by contemporary biomedicine. Ethnographic data suggests an imagination that is characterized by a material and corporeal engagement. Feminist theorists who propose new materialisms and the anthropology of science and technology provide a basis from which we can be attentive to practices in the enactment of new devices/bodies. These are theoretical approaches that foreground the participation of different entities and beings in the process of creating and developing medical technologies. A focus on practices allows us to observe how things can impinge on and contribute to the shape of their own forms, which implies that, in addition to being embodied, the imaginative process is also distributed. The article (re)situates the imagination, which is commonly rejected or sidelines in a purified modern scientific output, highlighting material engagement as an essential element in the process of technological development. The task of describing and claiming an embodied imagination, shared and not reduced to human intentionality, will establish a conversation with different approaches to and understandings of the creative process.

Keywords:
Imagination; Creative process; Responsible innovation; Body and embodiment

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