Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
This guide is intended as a resource for students and others interested in current research and controversies on emerging digital technologies, ethics, and society. I compiled it for my Fall 2018 classes to assist students in researching and writing their final papers.
In the fall 2018 semester, I am teaching a semester-long class on Cyborgs and Cybernetics at NYU Tandon School of Engineering. You can find the reading list in this post.
I teamed up with Jump Into the Light VR cinema and playlab to lead a workshop on Principles of User Research for VR and AR on May 15, 2018. You can catch up on key insights and reflections from the workshop here.
What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What kinds of worlds do they make possible? This year we’ll focus on the politics and possibilities of digital infrastructures. Starts Tuesday, June 5th in NYC.
This workshop, offered through my research group Implosion Labs in Brooklyn, NY, provides a deep dive into cyborg theory and cyborg anthropology. The workshop will explore how a cyborg anthropology approach uniquely combines grounded research on the realities of human-technology interactions with an openness to speculation and imagination.
On March 30, 2018, I led the workshop How Like a Cyborg: Rethinking the Agency of Users and Things in Innovation at the Social Innovation, Social Justice: Rethinking Design Anthropology symposium at the University of Cincinnati.
From designer babies to genetic surveillance, and from the “culture” of tech workplaces to the politics of climate change, feminist science studies writers are at the forefront of research on some of the most pressing issues in science and technology today. This course will delve into some of the apparent dilemmas that modern communities face through engagement with key works from more than thirty years of feminist science studies.
My upcoming course (new and improved for 2017!), Donna Haraway: Gender, Science, and Objectivity at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, starts July 13th at The Workmen’s Circle in New York, NY. Course meets for 4 weeks and is capped at 20.
My upcoming course, Science, Race and Colonialism at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, starts July 10th at The New York Academy of Medicine. Course meets for 4 weeks and is capped at 20.
What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What kinds of worlds do they make possible? The Politics of Infrastructure at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts Monday, June 5th at the New York Academy of Medicine.
Social Reproduction at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts June 8th at Verso Books in DUMBO, Brooklyn.
Life in the Anthropocene at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts starts Wednesday, March 8th at Verso Books (20 Jay St Brooklyn, NY 11201).
Disaster Capitalism at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts Thursday, February 2nd at The Workmen’s Circle (247 West 37th St 5th Floor, New York, NY 10018).
Happy New Year! Feminist Futures at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research starts January 30th at the New York Academy of Medicine (1216 Fifth Avenue New York, NY 10029)!
Developed as a tool for colonial empire-building at the close of the 19th century, the ethnographic method has emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries as an important practice for telling the stories of the oppressed and demanding social change. How did this transformation take place, and what does it mean for the future of how human societies study and understand themselves?
Informed by Marxist theory, feminism, and science studies, this class interrogates how drugs – both engineered pharmaceuticals and pleasurably addictive illegal substances – gain and reproduce their power in our social life. As total health expenditures approach 20% of American GDP, and drugs become dynamic components of everyday life, understanding the personal experience and political economy of these compounds is more crucial than ever.
Join me in Jersey City for the Brooklyn Institute’s first Jersey class at Word Bookstore!
Donna Haraway argues in her canonical essay, “A Manifesto For Cyborgs,” that to be a cyborg means to live in a world without tidy origin stories or innocent wholeness. Instead, it is about partial connections, complex kinship with humans, non-humans, and machines, and an acceptance of the messiness that it takes to get along better together. Using this formulation of cyborg theory as a jumping off point, this seminar will explore what it means to live in our modern world where myths of human-machine synthesis prefigure our attitudes toward technology and the future, the responsibility of humans toward non-humans and the environment, capitalist accumulation, and oppression based on gender, race, and class.
Over a career spanning four decades, philosopher of science Donna Haraway has revolutionized how social theorists and technoscience practitioners understand the situated objectivity of scientific knowledge, with special attention to the ways in which technoscience assigns biological meaning to social categories of gender. While Haraway is most famously associated with Cyborg Theory, this course will offer students an opportunity to survey the full scope of her oeuvre, including those works that draw on Marxist feminist theory, philosophy of science, and multispecies concerns.
What does it take to build an infrastructural system? What kind of norms do infrastructures enforce, and what kinds of people do they allow to thrive? What happens when infrastructure starts to break down, or prove inadequate in the face of disaster? What do infrastructures teach us? And what kind of world do they make possible? This four-week seminar pulls back the curtain to reveal the people, processes, and values that shape the infrastructures of modern life, and how these systems simultaneously provide opportunities for and place constraints on social life.
Through our investigation of the multiple lives of immunity, this class will explore how the strategic deployment of scientific knowledge and medico-technological practices animates a biopolitical understanding of society and embeds modern biomedicine in every aspect of social life.
