TechCare
Technologies of Care is an ethnographic research lab led by medical anthropologist Dr. Priscilla Song at the Department of Humanities in the College of Medicine at the Pennsylvania State University. The TechCare Lab examines local experiences, regional entanglements, and global flows of technological transformation, scientific research, and medical practice in Asia and beyond. Through humanistic inquiry and ethnographic approaches, we investigate the analytical questions and ethical dilemmas posed by contemporary and historical technoscientific projects and experimental health regimes.
Priscilla Song, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Humanities and Emergency Medicine at Penn State College of Medicine. She is a medical anthropologist working at the nexus of global health, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. She received her PhD and AM in Anthropology from Harvard University and her BA in Anthropology and Philosophy from Yale University. Her ethnographic research focuses on the social and ethical aspects of biomedical technologies, including the challenges of regulating experimental medical treatment in a globalized era, the ways in which digital communication technologies are transforming patient activism, and the unintended consequences of Chinese healthcare reforms.
Dr. Song has over two decades of experience conducting ethnographic fieldwork in Asia, as well as mixed-methods research with a diverse range of collaborators including social workers, public health scholars, psychologists, neuroscientists, gerontologists, nurses, emergency medicine physicians, neurosurgeons, Chinese medicine practitioners, patients, and their family members. Prior to joining Penn State, she taught anthropology, Asian studies, history, and medical humanities at the University of Hong Kong, Washington University in St. Louis, the New School for Social research, and Yale University.
