Anthropologist of Medicine and Technology
Ditching techno-utopia, how might technology–widely imagined–play a role in anthropologies yet to come? What new forms of knowledge production can be birthed through performative play? How can epistemologies and experiences beyond whiteness shape (academic) cultures yet-to-be? Can anti-racist research and making materialize spaces, technologies, and experiences that are enlivened by principles of afrofuturism, indigeneity, intuition, and collective well-being?
This year’s American Anthropology Association(AAA) theme is Resistance, Resilience, Adaptation. The Laboratory of Speculative Ethnology brings Wakanda University to the AAA as an embodiment of all three of these principles. Wakanda University at the AAA will be an ethnofuture space beyond whiteness that challenges anthropology from the ground up.
How does the financialization of life itself figure as a new means of producing value in modern technoscience? That is the question that motivated Kirk Fiereck to convene the panel “Biofinance: Speculation, Risk, Debt, and Value from Bios” at the 2016 American Anthropological Association meeting in Minneapolis, Minnesota last November.
Inspired by multispecies ethnography and science studies approaches, this panel proposes that we reconsider relationships between humans and other species through a lens of play–not just play for fun, but play that matters, that engages, tests, challenges, and remakes how one is in the world.
This panel, organized by the Science, Technology and Medicine special interest group of the Society for Medical Anthropology, builds on recent efforts in science studies and anthropology to open up the “black box” of valuation processes in technoscientific domains.
Danya Glabau 