Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the Insulin Pump as material-semiotic node, as a potential form of intra-action. It asks after the location of agency in the Insulin Pump and its users, as well as inquires after the politics of differential access to Insulin Pump technology and education globally.

Paper long abstract:

Following Joe Dumit's (Dumit 2014) exposition of the "implosion project," an activity designed after Donna Haraway's characteristic writing of implosions, this paper takes the Insulin Pump as material-semiotic node, as an ideologically generative device at the same time that it is a very real, highly material, life-saving object. Of what is the Insulin Pump composed? Is it only plastic, batteries, and wireless technology? Or is it also intra-action: matter, meaning, and agency combined in a biotechnological device differentially distributed across the globe?

This paper will begin by exploring the Insulin Pump after the New Materialism of Karen Barad, incorporating also Haraway's trope of the "cyborg." It will next attempt to trace differential access to Insulin Pump technology across the domain of global health, understanding this object as both modern medical technology and identity-constituting phenomenon. It will inquire after agency and the Insulin Pump, wondering if we locate this agency within the user of the Insulin Pump, within the pump itself, or in the entanglement of the two. Are Insulin Pump users and their machines, then, better understood as a type of becoming?

This paper will finally ask what type of biological citizens can be created by the Insulin Pump. Does differential access to Insulin Pump technology globally constitute different types of biological citizens? Is a politics of equal access only possible when we understand the Insulin Pump as inert, as an object about which we can produce authoritative scientific knowledge on improved health outcomes? Or can we locate within global health a place for the Insulin Pump as material-semiotic node?