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Podcast: New Books in Disability Studies
Episode: Scott Selberg, "Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood" (U Minnesota Press, 2022)
Description: With no known cause or cure despite a century of research, Alzheimer's disease is a true medical mystery. In Mediating Alzheimer's: Cognition and Personhood (U Minnesota Press, 2022), Scott Selberg examines the nature of this enduring national health crisis by looking at the disease's relationship to media and representation. He shows how collective investments in different kinds of media have historically shaped how we understand, treat, and live with this disease.Selberg demonstrates how the cognitive abilities that Alzheimer's threatens--memory, for example--are integrated into the operations of representational technologies, from Polaroid photographs to Post-its to digital artificial intelligence. Fo...