Rebecca Carlson

en

Rebecca Carlson is Associate Professor in Media Culture at Toyo University in Japan. Previously, she taught medical anthropology and global health for seven years at Tokyo Medical and Dental University. Her interest in the borders and bordering of medicine and biology grew out of a parallel interest in the boundaries that shape the circulation of media. She is currently researching efforts to globalize bioscience research in Japan.

 

research

research expositions

  • Sounds of Another Home: Telepresence, COVID-19 and a Bioscience Laboratory in Transition (2021) author(s): Rebecca Carlson published in: Journal of Sonic Studies
    Based on an ethnography of a bioscience laboratory in Tokyo before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, this paper focuses on telepresence, and the growing demand for workers to maintain extended simultaneous presence in multiple electronic, or electronically augmented, spaces. In contrast to views promoting the liberating affordances of telework in the maintenance of healthy work-life balance (reduced commute time; increased “presence” in family life), an analysis of sound reveals the way the home becomes reorganized, and ultimately de-prioritized, under work demands. In particular, online meetings, which privilege discrete information exchange, position the home as a barrier to productive communications. Receding the soundscape of the home in this way reflects a normalization of the neoliberal imperative to find self-realization in workplace forms of sociality.
     open exposition comments (0)