Joe Dumit is an anthropologist of passions, brains, games, bodies, drugs, and facts. He is chair of Performance Studies and professor of Science & Technology Studies and Anthropology at UC Davis (and former visiting professor at Interacting Minds Centre, Aarhus University). His books, Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans in Biomedical America, and Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health, look at how knowledge is made and how facts get into our lives, beliefs and activities. His recent work has concentrated on how learning and training take place in bodyminds, transform people, and generate new possibilities for action through contact improvisation, performance studies, practice as research, and embodied mindfulness. Combining medical anthropology with movement research, he’s been delving into fascia – training in massage including cranial sacral, dissecting cadavers with Gil Hedley, teaching minds in motion with Nita Little, teaching improvisation and movement to neuroscientists and artists, creating a Fascia Research Movement Lab with Kevin O’Connor, combining neuroscience and CI with Asaf Bachrach and others, and working with 3D virtual reality technologies.
Joseph Dumit
