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9781845407766

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Samerski compels us to confront both the limits of modern medicine and the insidious ways it often compels us to participate in what she meticulously reveals as the 'trap' of risk-management. She calls on us to see medicine as a menu of offerings we may not want. I'm delighted to read this book. -- Laura Mamo, author of Queering Reproduction We have entered a strange world in which those moral imperatives of choice and being fully informed constitute a spider's web, a decision trap, from which it is impossible to escape. At one level it is so obvious what has happened but sometimes the obvious needs pointing out and this short book does it economically and clearly. -- David Armstrong, Professor of Medicine and Sociology, KCL Silja Samerski, in this well written and provocative book, raises troubling questions about the 'managerial rationality' that she sees as now reshaping our very sense of ourselves and what it means to be human. She carefully analyzes real life genetic counseling sessions and explores the nature of autonomous decision making and the 'informed consent' that must always precede it. -- Jerry Brown, Governor of California Silja Samerski's The Decision Trap deftly and counter-intuitively argues that whereas choice is often regarded as equivalent to autonomy and self-determination, in actuality it is a new social technology for managing clients. Her investigation explores choice in the decision-environment of genetic counselling... [It] will be welcome reading for practitioners and students of health policy, as well as for historians of science and researchers of science, technology and society interested in public health and biopolitics. Samerski's analysis is brilliant and her insights path-breaking. -- S.M. Amadae, author of Rationalizing Capitalist Democracy, and Prisoners of Reason

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"Silja Samerski is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Leibniz University of Hannover. Her current research focuses on the history and social function of professional counselling. She is author of the book ""Die Verrechnete Hoffnung"" (The Mathematization of Hope) and has been published in numerous English and German journals and anthologies. She is s trained both as a human geneticist and a sociologist."

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