|
1
|
s
Laura
Mamo
Assistant
Professor
Ph.D.
University of California, San Francisco, 2002
Office:
3149 Art-Sociology Building
Phone: 301
405-9581
Email: lmamo@socy.umd.edu
Departmental Specialty Areas:
Theory
Additional Research Interests:
Medical Sociology, Science and Technology
Studies
Laura
Mamo
is an Assistant Professor in the Department of
Sociology and an Affiliate Assistant Professor
in the Departments of Women’s Studies and
Lesbian and Gay Studies. Her teaching areas include
contemporary social theories; feminist social
thought; cultural and social studies of science,
technology and medicine and queer theory and sexuality
studies. Her research explores intersections of
gender and sexuality with experiences of health,
illness, and the body; processes of biomedicalization;
and new pharmaceutical technologies.
Her recent book, Queering
Reproduction: Achieving Pregnancy in the Age of
Technoscience (Duke University Press, 2007)
begins with
a paradox: Lesbians’ trying to get pregnant
have a social problem not a medical one;
they need a substance that is by no means scarce.
And the procedure of insemination is very simple,
requiring the simplest of technologies that can
be learned from friends, the internet, and other
media sources. Yet, with increasing frequency
lesbians are turning to biomedicine to become
pregnant. Queering Reproduction explores
this paradox through in-depth interviews, cultural
history, and theoretical analysis. The book argues
that over the course of the twentieth century,
most significantly from the early 1990s onward
in the U.S., medically assisted-conception (reproduction
without sex) becomes a standard for everybody
and technoscientific knowledges and applications
enable this standardization.
Mamo is currently researching
the development, FDA approval, and marketing of
menstrual suppression drugs (in particular Seasonale®)
as “lifestyle drugs,” relatively new
pharmacological therapies (along with others for
the treatment of baldness, excessive weight or
height, depression, sexual function, general aging,
allergies, etc) that promise a re-fashioning of
the body with transformative, life-enhancing results.
In a second project, financed by the Canadian
Institute for Health Research, she is studying
the meanings of aging, anti-aging, memory loss,
and memory enhancement in the context of genetic
knowledge and testing for Alzheimer’s disease.
The focus lies with the ways people interpret
and interact with scientific knowledge, in this
case uncertain knowledge of the role of genes
and environment in Alzheimer’s disease,
and how these shape their actions.
Mamo has served as council member
of the ASA section on Science, Knowledge, and
Technology and is a past-recipient of the 1999
Hacker-Mullins paper award from that section.
She received the 2003 Rosenberg Mentor Award from
the Department of Sociology, University of Maryland.
Course Syllabi:
Sociology 621: Contemporary
Social Theory
Sociology
699D: Feminist Theory
Sociology 699E: Theories
of Science, Medicine, and the Body
Back to Top
|
