Book launch: The Connector by Alexandra Middleton

Please join us for a book launch to celebrate the publication of The Connector: Living with Experimental Neuroprosthetics by Alexandra Middleton (Duke University Press 2026)

The author will share a few introductory remarks, followed by a short commentary on the book from Janelle Taylor, Professor of Anthropology at University of Toronto, and Joseph Dumit, Professor of Anthropology at University of California Davis, and afterwards a reception. Light snacks and refreshments will be served. The event is hosted by MeST and DataSpace.

The Connector: Living with Experimental Neuroprosthetics

In The Connector, Alexandra Middleton examines how the frontiers of experimental medical science are always the everyday lived experiences for patients and their families and communities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Swedish labs and clinics that develop neuromusculoskeletal protheses, as well as in the homes of patients enrolled in clinical trials as they live with these new forms of prosthetics, Middleton shows how patients’ sensory experiences and domestic worlds become key spaces of scientific knowledge production that extend well beyond their visits to the lab. Through storytelling that centers the patients’ embodied knowledge and labor, along with the scientists who work closely with them, Middleton depicts how “connection” entails inhabiting the liminal space between ideation and materialization, a space punctuated not only by breakthroughs and breakdowns, but the slow work of the everyday. The Connector critically examines where biomedical innovation, scientific discovery, and the “cutting edge” come from in ways that foreground the importance of the domestic spaces in which experimental science take place.

“The Connector is an ethnographic masterpiece. Middleton’s bold rethinking of brain-science enigmas forges revelatory connections among the injured, neuro-prosthetics, and the intimate frontiers of human-machine life at home.” - Adriana Petryna, author of Horizon Work: At the Edges of Knowledge in an Age of Runaway Climate Change

The Connector will be published on May 12^th, but is now available for pre-order in North and South America (in April, in the rest of the world). Duke Press is offering a discount code of 30% (using the code E26MDLTN) for those who want to order the book ahead of time (*UK and Europe orders can be placed through MNG - University Presses using the same code: https://lnkd.in/emGzGsrb).