Sarah Jain

Assistant Professor
Cultural and Social Anthropology
Building 110-112T
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2145
Tel (650) 723-5669
Fax (650) 725-0605

sarjain@stanford.edu

Current Research

I have three main areas of study, which are broadly situated under the overlapping headings of design, injury, and mobility.

My book, Injury, analyzes injury production in the United States through the lens of tort law. I argue that despite the central role of personal injury law in American culture, in itself the law provides an emaciated language with which to understand the material world and its relations with human sentience, or corporate capitalism and its human costs. The depolitized version of law as a neutral adjudicator of product designs and human behaviours obscures two crucial phenomena that the book examines in detail. First, tort law distributes human inequality and wounding – already distributed through the prior machinations of consumption and capitalism, while covering its tracks in a language of objectivity that is largely based in unexamined assumptions about the nature of objects. Second, tort law shuttles attention away from the ways that injury is central – not incidental – to American commodity capitalism, and its costs are spread through product design, desemination, and consumption. In short, tort law and its promise of reparable harms is a deeply political project, with vast implications of whose bodies the costs of progress fall onto.

In my second project, Commodity Violence, I examine the recent BMW internet advertising, which has been hailed as the new wave in advertising. In this piece I argue that roads and cars present us with a unique opportunity to understand how violence underpins the circulation of commodities in the contemporary United States. Focussing particularly on Guy Ritchie’s “Star,” I examine how our enjoyment and myths about “our” enjoyment of cars is constructed, particularly focussing on representations of cars, crashes, and speed in popular culture, engineering, and market research.

I will be on leave for the academic year 2004-2005 initiating a new study on wheelchair design and development.

Education

Ph.D. History of Consciousness, UC Santa Cruz,1999

Current Courses:

* CASA 181 - Car Culture. Autumn Quarter.
* CASA 183 - Mobility Lab. Autumn Quarter.
* CASA 132 - Science, Technology and Gender. Winter Quarter.

Selected publications

Scholarly Articles

2004	"'Dangerous Instrumentality': The Bystander as Subject in Automobility," in Cultural Anthropology 19(1): 61-94.
2003	"'Come up to the Kool Taste’: African American Upward Mobility and the Semiotics of Smoking Menthols,” Public Culture 15:3
2002	“Urban Errands: The Means of Mobility.” Journal of Consumer Culture 2:3
1998d	“Mysterious Delicacies and Ambiguous Agents: Lennart Nilsson in National Geographic.” Configurations 6:3, 373-394.
1998c	“Inscription Fantasies and Interface Erotics: Keyboards, Law, Repetitive Strain Injuries.” Hastings Journal of Women and Law 9:2, 219-253.
1998b	"Edgeplay: Reproducing the Public Private" August 4 1998.
1998a	“Prosthetic Pathology: Enabling and Disabling the Prosthesis Trope.” Science, Technology, and Human Values 24:1, 31-54.

In the Press

"Heavy Metal" in Stanford Magazine, September/October, 2004.

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