Medicine and the Body

Curating an issue on technologies of medicine and the body presented unique challenges due to the field’s extensive reliance on US military and Department of Defense funding. Bioethicists and AI researchers like Phil Agre have pointed out tech’s deep ties with military interests—providing a historical through line whose connections, implied and explicit, emerge throughout the pages that follow. Building on similar work from the 1980s, computational cognitive scientist Chris Dancy reflects on what it means to be a researcher in heavily militarized fields like neurotech and cognitive sciences, a context where a critique of medical technologies, and the industries that support them, is inseparable from that of the conditions of war and genocide. As a companion to our featured tech explainer by Andrea Stocco on biomedical engineering or the brain–computer interfaces, Dancy traces these connections to genocides crisscrossing the globe.

This issue was birthed while Columbia University, where Logic(s) is administratively housed within the Incite Institute, sicced the New York Police Department on pro-Palestinian protestors demanding the university divest from weapons development and Israel’s genocidal occupation. President Minouche Shafik’s decision to violently disperse the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on April 18 accelerated the timeline for the magazine to reckon with its own complicity with the university, with the goal of determining how, as a project that neither works with nor primarily serves students and faculty, we can strategically contribute to the demands for divestment. Following this editorial note is a press release detailing the concrete steps that Logic(s) and a series of aligned projects at the Incite Institute are taking to deprive the university of resources, and to work toward exiting the institution over the course of this year. Through a staff-wide town hall and other collective discussions, we’ve thought deeply about how we can meaningfully shift power, rather than just giving symbolic credence to a free Palestine. We invite comment from readers on this plan, but let us be unambiguous when we say that the Western academy, and Columbia University in particular, has blood on its hands: it has directly contributed to the violent dispossession of Palestinian people and the demonization of resistance. We stand with Palestine, a free Sudan, a free Democratic Republic of the Congo, a free Tigray and Oromia. We must free all oppressed and Indigenous peoples globally, and free our movements from the shallow politics of litany. Each of these regions and their associated movements for self-determination requires us to slow down enough to appreciate the specificities—including the way unity often serves as a cover for violence.