Presenters

Karen-Sue Taussig

Karen-Sue Taussig is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Minnesota. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology at The Johns Hopkins University. She has previously taught in the Department of the History of Science at Harvard University where she also held a two year post-doctoral position in the Department of Social Medicine. She is the author of Ordinary Genomes: Science, Citizenship, and Genetic Identities.

Her current project, Genetics and Its Publics: Crafting Scientific and Medical Literacies in the New Age of Biotechnology, examines the diverse future building activities set in to motion by the explosion of knowledge in the life sciences, particularly efforts to develop a molecular medical clinic. She has also recently begun a new project examining questions related to the role of the idea of "potential" in relation to humanness in the context of the new life sciences.

Simon Cole

Simon A. Cole is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Criminology, Law and Society at the University of California, Irvine. He received his A.B. in History from Princeton University and his Ph.D. in Science & Technology Studies from Cornell University. His most recent book is Truth Machine: The Contentious History of DNA Fingerprinting (University of Chicago Press, 2008, with Michael Lynch, Ruth McNally & Kathleen Jordan). He is a member of the American Judicature Society Commission on Forensic Science & Public Policy. His current interests are the sociology of forensic science and the development of criminal identification databases and biometric technologies.

Miriam Ticktin

Miriam Ticktin is assistant professor of anthropology at the New School for Social Research; she did her doctoral work in Cultural Anthropology (Stanford) and medical Anthropology (EHESS, Paris). She has been interested in the category of the human, and as part of this, in the discourse and practice of humanitarianism. She conducted research in France with undocumented immigrants, following their quest for basic human rights, and more recently, she has done comparative work with humanitarian NGOs and refugees in the United States. Her book (forthcoming 2011, University of California Press) tentatively entitled, "The Moral Emergency Complex: Humanitarianism, Sexual Violence and the Politics of Immigration in France" looks at how politics are enacted in the name of care and protection, under threat of emergency. She has also co-edited a volume with Ilana Feldman called ÒIn the Name of Humanity: the Government of Threat and CareÓ that is forthcoming with Duke University Press in 2010. Her new research examines the interplay between law, medicine and science in creating and erasing distinctions between human and animal.

Jennifer Hamilton

Jennifer A. Hamilton is Assistant Professor of Legal Studies and Anthropology and Director of the Law Program at Hampshire College. She is a cultural anthropologist who is centrally interested in how ideas of difference shape institutional forms, and how they influence individual and social subjectivities. In particular, her work centers on the question why and how, and to what effect, human differenceÑincluding understandings of race, gender, ethnicity, ancestry, genetic variation, and populationÑhas come to occupy a central place in our current understandings of law, ethics, and biomedicine. She is the author of /Indigeneity in the Courtroom: Law, Culture, and the Production of Difference in North American Courts/ (Routledge 2008) and is currently working on a new manuscript tentatively titled,/The Case of the Genetic Ancestor: Law, Race, and Gender in a Genomic Age/.

Her teaching and research interests center around the social studies of law, science, and biomedicine; critical bioethics; the politics of indigeneity; theories of culture and identity; and critical race and gender studies.

Joan Fujimura

Joan H. Fujimura is Professor of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Professor of Science and Technology Studies in the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center. Before coming to Madison, she was the Luce Professor for Biotechnology and Society at Stanford University and Assistant Professor in Sociology at Harvard University. She has been a member in the School of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, and an Abe Fellow at the University of Tokyo, Japan. Fujimura has written on the sociology of genetics, molecular biology, biotechnology, biomedicine, and HIV-AIDS research. Recent publications include "Postgenomic Futures," New Genetics and Society, vol. 24, no. 3 (August 2005), pp. 195-225, and "Sex Genes,Ó Signs, vol. 32, 1 (Autumn 2006): 49-82, "The Science and Business of Genetic Ancestry Testing,Ó Science, vol. 318, and an edited special issue on race, genetics, and medicine for Social Studies of Science (October 2008). She is also author of Crafting Science: A Socio-History of the Quest for the Genetics of Cancer (Harvard University Press, 1996) and co-editor of The Rights Tools for the Job: At Work in Twentieth-Century Life Sciences (Princeton University Press, 1992). Fujimura is currently publishing articles from a project on conceptualization of "populationÓ in the collection and analysis of the data in human genetics studies around disease and evolution especially as they impact human categories of race and is writing a book on this topic as it connects to theories of race. She has also been studying interdisciplinarity, collaboration, and "big scienceÓ in systems biology and epigenetics programs during the past few years and will focus on this project over the next two years. She is also co-authoring a study of the development of fields analyses in science studies and in sociology

Jonathan Metzl

Jonathan M. Metzl is Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Women's Studies and Director of the Program in Culture, Health, and Medicine at the University of Michigan. A 2008 Guggenheim recipient, Metzl has written extensively for medical, humanities, and popular publications. His books include Prozac on the Couch: Prescribing Gender in the Era of Wonder Drugs (Duke, 2003) and The Protest Psychosis: How Schizophrenia Became a Black Disease (Beacon, 2010).

Joseph Masco

Joseph Masco is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (winner of the 2008 Rachel Carson Prize from the Society for the Social Studies of Science and co-winner of the 2006 Robert Merton Prize from the American Sociology Association). His current work examines the evolution of the national security state in the United States, with a particular focus on the public interplay between affect, technology, mass media, and threat perception.

Noa Vaisman

Noa Vaisman is a Postdoctoral Lecturer at the University of Chicago’s Human Rights Program. She received her Ph.D. in 2008 from the Anthropology Department at Cornell University. Her dissertation Talk, Dreamwork, and Specters: (Re)Constructing Patterns of Truth, Self and Society in Present-Day Buenos Aires explores the social, legal and political processes of post-dictatorial collective rebuilding among middle class porteños (the inhabitants of the capital city). Based on over two and a half years of fieldwork in Buenos Aires this work looks at the patterns that connect processes of social reconstruction with middle class porteños’ ways of being-in-the-world, modes of sociality and temporality.

She is currently working on a book manuscript based on this dissertation project. More recently she has also been involved in thinking through the implications of the new sciences and new technologies on human rights and on Western conceptions of the subject. She is developing a comparative research project that focuses on these issues in Argentina and Spain. She is the organizer of the Human Rights and the New Sciences Symposium.

Paul Vanouse

Paul Vanouse has been working in emerging technological media forms since 1990. Interdisciplinarity and impassioned amateurism guide his art practice. His electronic cinema, biological experiments, and interactive installations have been exhibited in 20 countries and widely across the US. Vanouse’s work has been supported by Creative Capital Foundation, Renew Media Foundation, New York State Council on the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, Sun Microsystems, Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, Heinz Foundation, Mellon Charitable Trust, and National Science Foundation. He is an Associate Professor of Visual Studies at the University at Buffalo where he co-directs the Emerging Media MFA.